Re: relevant paper on using OWL (description logics) for RDF validation

Hi Peter,

thanks for your paper. It shows that it is possible to reuse the OWL 
vocabulary for closed-world constraint checking. I believe there is 
little disagreement that this is feasible in theory and that 
owl:Restrictions cover some of the requirements identified in the 
catalog, esp cardinality and range restrictions. In fact, the 
closed-world semantics are probably how a lot of people already use OWL 
anyway and some ontology editors have already used owl:maxCardinality 
info to limit user input. However, OWL only covers a subset of the 
overall requirements and could therefore IMHO only be one aspect of a 
larger solution.

In the implementation section you briefly mention:

"(Recent work at Mannheim implements OWL descriptions as constraints 
using a similar approach.)"

I would like to hear your thoughts about this approach. I assume you are 
referring to the work announced by Thomas Bosch to the previous mailing 
list

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-shapes/2014Jul/0250.html

This is a SPIN constraint library that scans the input graph at usages 
of the OWL namespace and reports violations against the closed world 
interpretation, very similar to what you describe in your paper and to 
what other OWL closed-world implementations such as Stardog ICV do. All 
that is needed to activate this type of constraint checking for a given 
graph is to mark that graph, e.g. with a spin:imports (or ic:imports) 
triple.

Basically what this is outlining is that if something like SPIN would be 
standardized, then a SPIN constraints library can be published that 
knows how to interpret OWL restrictions etc. However, people would have 
the freedom to mix and match OWL with other vocabularies, without being 
limited by the design choices of a language that was driven by the 
computational theory of Description Logics. If someone wants to have 
their graph interpreted with OWL closed-world semantics, they would only 
need to add a triple

     my:Ontology spin:imports <http://w3.org/something/owl>

and a generic SPIN engine can figure out the rest from there, without 
requiring any hard-coded knowledge about OWL. This would in principle 
allow users to reuse existing OWL ontology definitions.

Another question I have is how you would address the issue of redefining 
the semantics of the OWL vocabulary that already has numerous books and 
papers written about it, all explaining the details of a rather 
different open-world semantics. That issue could suggest that a fresh 
start with a new vocabulary (such as Shapes) might be a better option 
than confusing the market with a semantically overloaded vocabulary.

Thanks,
Holger


On 10/23/2014 16:10, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
> I suggested that anyone who is going to present technical stuff at the 
> WF F2F meeting next week send out something about the stuff beforehand.
>
> I am here covering my marker.  (In a certain sense - this is an 
> academic paper, not a manual, although this stuff is actually 
> implemented in Stardog ICV, more or less.)
>
> Questions welcome.
>
> peter
>
>
>

Received on Saturday, 25 October 2014 04:04:30 UTC