Re: [Patterns] Materialize Inferences (was Re: Triple materialization at publisher level)

On Apr 7, 2010, at 14:45 , Dan Brickley wrote:

> A guideline might be:
> 
> "As typing information become broader and more inclusive, they also
> become less informative: to know that something is a "Thing" is rarely
> useful. It is difficult to say whether a class is at a useful level of
> specificity without taking into account other datasets, tools and
> services that use it, however an intuitive grasp of "mid-level"
> concepts often provides useful guidance. In addition, Linked Data apps
> have a particular concern for cross-referencing information about
> specific things, it is therefore often useful to include inferred
> identifiers (owl:sameAs etc) based on analysis of properties
> (owl:FunctionalProperty, owl:InverseFunctionalProperty) etc"
> 
> Ok that's not very friendly text but hope it might be useful.
> Basically "rdf:type owl:Thing" is boring, but "owl:sameAs x:anotherID"
> is very useful...
> 

I am a little bit concerned by the open-endedness of this. As an information consumer I would like to have at least some information or hints as for which inferences are materialized and which are not.

As a thought experiment: what about providing a set of RIF (Core) rules that describe which inferences are materialized? It is possible to express RDFS as well as OWL-RL via RIF rules and, what is even more important in this context, any subsets thereof. Human clients may look at those rules and, with little training, may understand what is happening for the simpler cases; after all, many publisher will decide to use 2-3 rules only (eg, subproperty and subclass inferences). Machine clients may even choose to instantiate the inferences themselves with some local rule engine if their CPU/bandwidth ratio makes that more attractive.

I know, the current RIF syntax is not all that beautiful (but I would hope that alternative syntaxes will come to the fore, mainly if the demand is there) and I am not sure whether rule engines, bound to RDF environments (like Jena Rules or Fuxi) already implement RIF Core (although I believe/hope they would). But that seems to be a possible way to go nevertheless...

Ivan

(To avoid misunderstanding: with his W3C Position's hat down:-)


> cheers,
> 
> Dan
> 


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Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
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