Re: OWL 2.0 ...

Going back a couple of months now...

On 07/04/2005, at 11:14 PM, Jim Hendler wrote:
>  (NOTE: This is a private message, it has no link to the Sem Web  
> activity, or anything else -- I write this wearing my professor hat!)
>
> In recent days I've been attending a lot of meetings where I have  
> been approached by people talking about not just the limitations of  
> the current OWL (something I've been hearing about for a long  
> time :-)) but actually talking about proposed technical  
> solutions.   I think it would be good to start to collect some of  
> these and to think a bit about those things that we might want to  
> see go into some future OWL version
>   There's a wide variety of these things going from simple  
> extensions to OWL (such as adding qualified restrictions, having an  
> owl:allDisjoint , etc.)  to adding some standard ways of doing  
> common things in other KR langauges  (part-whole, bounded  
> transitivity, probability models)  or going beyond to new concepts  
> in Sem Web (new models of partial import, named ontology segments,  
> etc.)
>   I'd like to hear what people are working on, or what people need  
> - this way we'll have these ideas on record for the eventual next  
> generation of OWL technology.

This may appear quite naïve, but I've noted that OWL permits many of  
the accessibility relationships of modal logic (transitivity,  
reflexivity, symmetry) but not relationships that are Euclidean.   
What I mean, is to say for a relationship R1:
R1(A,B)
R1(A,C)
=> R2(B,C)

For some relationship R2.  This would seem useful in a case like the  
property "parentOf" if it were to relate to "siblingOf".

At the moment this sort of thing is done with rule systems, but it  
seems to me that the way relationships relate to each other is also a  
part of an ontology.  Rule systems are often very specific, while  
ontologies are much more general, so I think it's better to express a  
concept in an ontology, if possible.

The above example relies on R2 being symmetric, but if such a  
construct were describable in OWL then perhaps non-symmetric versions  
could also be expressed?  This would create the possibility of  
describing more complex relationships, like "uncleOf".

As I said, this is probably naïve, but I've been wondering about  
expressing relationships between properties for a while.  I'd  
appreciate any feedback on the problems this sort of thing would cause.

Regards,
Paul Gearon

Received on Friday, 3 June 2005 13:54:05 UTC