- From: Kaarel Kaljurand <kaljurand@gmail.com>
- Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2006 19:07:08 +0100
- To: "John McClure" <jmcclure@hypergrove.com>
- Cc: "Pat Hayes" <phayes@ihmc.us>, "Dan Connolly" <connolly@w3.org>, "Anne Cregan" <annec@cse.unsw.edu.au>, public-owl-dev@w3.org
Hello, On 11/30/06, John McClure <jmcclure@hypergrove.com> wrote: > > Pat said: > >Nothing turns on the noun/verb distinction. > > The noun/verb distinction prompted my original note. The paper that Kaarel > cited statistically reviewed the linguistics of property names, and found that > verbs are involved with 65% of property names. In my responses to Kaarel's > plaintive assertion that ALL properties should be verb-based, I pointed out > (1) how radical the shift to verbs for property names IS relative to > long-established practice within the industry; just to clarify a little: what I think I've managed to prove with the OWL verbalizer (http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/attempto/documentation/OWL_to_ACE/) is that a Description Logic like SROIQ can be verbalized in acceptable and understandable English given that the input ontology uses English transitive verbs for the property names. Note that I'm only talking about object properties and not data-valued properties. I.e. if one wants to discuss his/her ontology with somebody how doesn't understand any of the proposed OWL syntaxes (RDF-based or not) then the ontology should first be fixed to have verbs as object property names, and then verbalized. Without this fix, the verbalization would not be understandable. (A compromise is to use "verbs" in the form "has+Noun", the verbalization would not suffer that much.) I just hope that the benefit of having a nice English verbalization outweighs the burden of having to apply this fix. -- kaarel
Received on Thursday, 30 November 2006 18:07:21 UTC