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

Jim Hendler wrote:

>
> 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
>
This is a very interesting argument. I look forwardto hearing more, if 
this continues. OWL 1.1, or any expansion/patch to OWL sounds very 
interesting, and I am looking forward to hearing news about it. I looked 
at a few sites that had notes on OWL 1.1, and the meta-modelling 
features look very nice.

" With the above change [punning], general properties can be placed on 
names that are used as classes, and there is additional syntactic sugar 
to allow the placement of property values in class and property axioms, 
as in Class(Person partial super(Animal) type(MyClass) value(dc:creator 
peter)) which is syntactic sugar for Class(Person partial) plus 
Individual(Person super(Animal) type(MyClass) value(dc:creator peter)). 
(The above example assumes a definition for dc:creator as an 
individual-valued property.) "

This looks pretty nice.

On a side note, thank you for the link to "classes-as-values" page, 
Prof. Hendler. It looks very useful.

Dan

Received on Friday, 11 August 2006 18:30:50 UTC