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

On 08/04/2010 09:16, Ivan Herman wrote:
>
> 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 think that's a great suggestion. A good use for RIF Core - allows you 
to separate the declaration of the inferences to be materialized from 
how they are implemented.

What's more, since RIF rules can be identified by URIs (part of the 
metadata infrastructure in RIF), then common inference patterns can be 
easily denoted by just referencing published rules rather than having to 
copy them out anywhere. Indeed you can have identifiers for groups of 
rules, so a single URI for common patterns would be easy.

> 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...

A nicer RDF friendly syntax wouldn't be too hard.

We had planned for Jena to support RIF Core, the plans got put on ice 
with all the disruptions for us last year but could be thawed out.

Dave

Received on Thursday, 8 April 2010 08:35:20 UTC