Re: OWL "Sydney Syntax", structured english

Hello,

On 11/28/06, Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org> wrote:

> The results are sorta reasonable...
>
> Every VCard revs at most 1 things .
> Every Name family-names at most 1 things .
> Every Name given-names at most 1 things .
> Every Name additional-names at most 1 things .
> Every Name honorific-prefixs at most 1 things .
> Every Name honorific-suffixs at most 1 things .
> ...
>
> though they show that the OWL_to_ACE tool doesn't expect
> use of the http://esw.w3.org/topic/RoleNoun pattern.

No, the expectation is that every propertyname is a transitive English
verb, rather than a noun. There are studies that seem to indicate that
this is the case in reality, see e.g.:

http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/~cmellish/papers/kbs05.pdf

Of course, the nouns could be turned into "verbs" by using the "has+Noun"
pattern (with inverse "is+Noun+of"). E.g. in PENG, there is a construction
"has+X+as+a+Noun" that as the same effect.

> I'd suggest supporting a special kind of label for the purpose of
> controlled english generation; i.e. a subproperty of rdfs:label.
> maybe ace:englishVerb.

The idea of our verbalization is to produce an English text that can be
parsed back into the official OWL representation without any loss in meaning
with regard to the original OWL file. Using labels would break this
design decision
immediately.

>> Our claim is that an average user can
> > grasp
> > the contents of an ontology better if it was presented in ACE rather
> > than
> > visualized by Protege or similar editors. (We haven't done any
> > experiments
> > yet to back this up.)
>
> I have heard this claim from other places, though.
>
> I agree that rendering to a constrained dialect of English is an
> interesting user-interface technique; I made a note about that
> during the OWL-ED workshop
>  http://swig.xmlhack.com/2006/11/10/2006-11-10.html#1163171978.746560
>
> "(Tom? stanford guy) says the English format spit out by SWOOP is very
> valuable"

Thanks, I'll check out the latest version of SWOOP.

-- 
kaarel

Received on Wednesday, 29 November 2006 10:57:56 UTC