Re: OWL "Sydney Syntax", structured english

Hello,

On 11/30/06, Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-11-30 at 19:07 +0100, Kaarel Kaljurand wrote:
> >
> > I just hope that the benefit of having a nice English verbalization outweighs
> > the burden of having to apply this fix.
>
> Changing the URIs in an ontology is about the most burdensome thing
> you can ask an ontology developer to do.

Aren't there refactoring tools integrated into ontology editors?

> It's *much* less expensive to add transitive verb labels.
>
> Your earlier reply to this suggestion was:
>
> > 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.
>
> But now you're saying that your verbalization only partially understands
> OWL, since it doesn't handle datatype properties (and it only handles
> OWL DL, not all of OWL). So the round-trip requirement is only going
> to be met in a very constrained set of cases.

Yes, datatype properties are not supported, it's work in progress.
I'm not sure how constrained the set of cases without datatype properties
is. Some large ontologies (Galen?) don't use them at all.

> I think your tool will be much more useful if it exploits transitive
> verb labels.

That would be an easy change, but I think the round-trip requirement
is really important. It enables the "view source" effect, i.e. one can view
the OWL file in ACE, do some modifications (in ACE) and publish it
again (in OWL).
Knowing the details of ACE wouldn't be needed in many cases.

> In particular, is useless to me if as long as it requires me to change
> the URIs in ontologies; especially since, in many cases, the ontology
> I am interested in is not where I have any ability to change its
> URIs. But I can always add labels (assuming your tool isn't constrained
> to one source of data about the ontology in question).

OK, but would you consider using verbs for properties in your next ontology
(that you have full control over)? :)

-- 
kaarel

Received on Thursday, 30 November 2006 18:55:08 UTC