Re: Not out of the water yet...OWL DL properties

At 13:57 -0400 8/11/06, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
>On Aug 11, 2006, at 1:50 PM, Jim Hendler wrote:
>
>>   While I am not at all upset with your move to OWL Full (and wish 
>>everyone else would as well), I admit that there may be cases where 
>>using tools like Pellet can be useful, and the report above shows 
>>some fairly easy to use approaches
>
>Well that's a provocative statement! Why do you wish everyone would 
>move to owl full?
>
>-Alan

I've never hidden the fact, and have said in public on many 
occasions, that I felt it was a mistake to have multiple OWL 
profiles, and that the restrictions on DL were such that they add 
significant complexity for OWL use with little gain.   That said, 
having lost this debate back in the Web Ontology Working Group, my 
group has gone along with this decision, developing OWL DL tools 
(such as Pellet), debugging tools for OWL DL (in SWOOP), etc.
  I should mention that I strongly believe most of these tools would 
work just fine with some small heuristic changes to relax the 
restrictions imposed by OWL DL, meaning tools could simply be "OWL 
Tools" and not Full v. DL.  What would change is that if one lived 
outside the restrictions of what is now called OWL DL, you would lose 
some reasoning guarantees, but I happen to believe, unlike many in 
this community, that those guarantees are drastically over-rated, and 
contribute to people being able to publish papers, not to real 
systems that real people want to use to solve real problems. 
Needing workarounds for things like this user's problems (he is 
trying to do the straight-forward encoding, and now he will need to 
do extra work if he wants to use the current tools), or even worse to 
have database keys (i.e. inversefunctional datatypes properties) was 
a very foolish mistake on our part, and I believe the community will 
either come to regret it (by seeing OWL use replaced by rule 
implementations) or will have to come up with workable solutions 
(some of which, I'm happy to say, are happening in the OWL 1.1 
framework that Bijan mentioned).
   In other words, it would make much more sense for us to fix our 
tools instead of fixing our users (with the connotation of neutering 
in the latter case being very much intended).
   -JH

-- 
Prof James Hendler				hendler@cs.umd.edu
Dept of Computer Science			http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler
AV Williams Bldg				301-405-2696 (work)
Univ of Maryland				301-405-6707 (Fax)
College Park, MD 20853 USA

Received on Friday, 11 August 2006 18:19:10 UTC