Re: OWL 2.0

On 1 Jun 2005, at 22:08, Gerd Wagner wrote:

>
>>> 5) That said, another form of syntactic sugar - beacause
>> again you can use existing
>>> OWL constructs to reach the same goal, but it is very
>> strenuous to do so - would be
>>> to define UNA locally. Like either to say "all individuals
>> in this ontology are
>>> mutually different" or "all individuals with this namespace
>> are mutually different".
>>> I think, due to XML constraints the first one would be the
>> weapon of choice.
>>
>> I am not sure you will ever get anything but allDifferent to
>> address this requirement.
>> It doesn't quite do what you want, but it is close.
>
> Having to make an "allDifferent" statement, and even more so
> all the pairwise "disjointWith" statements for base classes,
> is really cumbersome, and contradicts good practices in
> computational logic (that have been established in UML/OCL,
> SQL and Prolog).
>
> In a more natural approach these statements would hold by default.

It depends what you mean by "by default". It is possible to imagine an 
ontology development tool that makes it easy to add such axioms to the 
ontology, and even one that will perform this action "by default" 
(obviously allowing the user to cancel/undo the action in the case 
where difference/disjointness is not intended). This solution may be 
adequate in many cases, and has zero cost (apart from some tool 
building effort).

Ian

p.s. I believe that Protege is being or already has been extended to 
include such facilities.


>
> -Gerd
>
> --------------------------------------------
> Professor Gerd Wagner
> http://www.informatik.tu-cottbus.de/~gwagner
> Email: G.Wagner@tu-cottbus.de
> Tel: (+49 355) 69 2397
> Institute of Informatics
> Brandenburg University of Technology
> at Cottbus, Germany
>
>
>
>

Received on Friday, 3 June 2005 12:29:38 UTC