Re: Reflexivity and antisymmetry uses cases?

Thanks for these example use cases.  I have also received another one in 
a private email, plus the one from Pierluigi.  Makes so far three groups 
who are interested in this.

While I see that a lot of OWL properties could be made irreflexive and 
antisymmetric, I wonder about what the ontology users would get out of 
it.  Would they expect to get different inference results, or would the 
extra information act as constraints to validate user input, or what else?

On a more general level, I am a bit concerned that the addition of these 
extra features may be more driven by theoretical advances in DL 
reasoners than by real user requirements.  Let's face it, we have a 
trade-off here if we add more and more features to a language that a lot 
of people already find much too complex: while some users may argue that 
they need the additional expressiveness, these additional features also 
increase the learning curve, implementation overhead, and perception of 
OWL as a ivory tower language.  During my time in the Protege community 
and even more so at TopQuadrant, I don't remember anyone asking for 
reflexivity and antisymmetry.  Maybe the people of this list have more 
use cases to show?

Holger


John Goodwin wrote:
>> we are looking into the user interface requirements that will 
>> be needed to support OWL 1.1. Toward this end, we are 
>> interested in understanding the use cases in support of the 
>> various new features of OWL 1.1.  I can easily make sense of 
>> user-defined datatypes and QCRs, but I don't think I had seen 
>> a lot of examples for some of the other proposed features so 
>> far (except for toy ontologies):
>>
>>   - owl:SelfRestriction
>>   - owl:IrreflexiveProperty
>>   - owl:AntiSymmetricProperty
>>
>> If you know of a published list of use cases (either formal 
>> or informal), or if you have your own use case for any of 
>> these features, I would be interested in seeing them.
> 
> Holger,
> 
> It is argued that reflexivity is required when modelling mereology. See
> 
> http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/OEP/SimplePartWhole/index.html
> 
> 
> I think these properties of OWL 1.1 could certainly have applications in
> the geospatial domain. For example we might want to say that all rivers
> flow into rivers, seas or lakes but they cannot flow into themselves. I
> guess we could do this as follows:
> 
> River -> flowsInto some (River or Sea or Lake) and not flowsInto Self
> 
> Many topological relationships (for example those of RCC8) would be
> irreflexive and antisymmetric. 
> 
> These properties might also be useful in modelling topology with some
> notion of orientation. Properties such as "northOf", "eastOf", "leftOf",
> "above" etc. would be antisymmetric and antisymmetric. 
> 
> As we experiment more with OWL1.1 I can probably come up with more
> examples.
> 
> John
> 
> 
> 
> Dr John Goodwin
> Research Scientist
> Research Labs, Ordnance Survey 
> Room C530, Romsey Road, SOUTHAMPTON, United Kingdom, SO16 4GU 
> Phone: +44 (0) 23 8030 5756 | Mobile: +44 (0) 7xxx xxxxxx | Fax: +44 (0)
> 23 8030 5072 
> www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk | john.goodwin@ordnancesurvey.co.uk 
> Please consider your environmental responsibility before printing this
> email. 
> .
> 
> 
> This email is only intended for the person to whom it is addressed and may contain confidential information. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender and delete this email which must not be copied, distributed or disclosed to any other person.
> 
> Unless stated otherwise, the contents of this email are personal to the writer and do not represent the official view of Ordnance Survey. Nor can any contract be formed on Ordnance Survey's behalf via email. We reserve the right to monitor emails and attachments without prior notice.
> 
> Thank you for your cooperation.
> 
> Ordnance Survey
> Romsey Road
> Southampton SO16 4GU
> Tel: 08456 050505
> http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk
> 
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 17 January 2007 00:14:06 UTC