Re: declaredAs

Hello,

I see another issue with declarations when using declarations (e.g. 
instead of rdf:type) to introduce properties without any further axioms 
referring to that property. In case of adding a simple ObjectProperty to 
an ontology we have not any possibility to do it if we don't have any 
superproperty, subproperty, disjointness, annotation, ... axioms. Note 
that there are many ontologies on the Web which exactly do this and 
where the dataset (i.e. the ABox) is defined separately. As a workaround 
(not a solution) we can always define a domain axiom referring to 
owl:Thing as description, or we can add a declaration axiom. However, if 
using the latter solution the problem is that we use a mechanism for 
structural consistency tests for definition of entities. Do we really 
want to do it this way or do we need another mechanism for defining 
entities?

Cheers,
  Olaf



Boris Motik schrieb:
>
> Hello,
>
>  
>
> I have just taken a look at this declaredAs issue, and wanted to (I) 
> highlight a potential problem that might arise if we conflate typing 
> and declaredness, (II) summarize the discussion about the problems of 
> the existing solution, and (III) propose a new solution.
>
>  
>
> --------------------
>
> I: The Problem
>
> --------------------
>
>  
>
> Our main reason for introducing declarations was to be able to detect 
> typos. Unrelated to this, we need explicit typing information to be 
> able to parse the ontology. If we conflate the two notions, we have 
> problems, which are particularly acute if we also use imports. 
> Consider the ontology O1 that contains the triple
>
>  
>
> (1)  a:myProp rdf:type owl:ObjectProperty
>
>  
>
> and the ontology O2 that imports O1 and additionally contains the triples
>
>  
>
> (2)  a:x1 owl:someValuesFrom a:myConcept
>
> (3)  a:x1 owl:onProperty a:myPrp           (<= notice the typo!).
>
>  
>
>  
>
> The ontology O2 is not parsable by itself, because we do not know what 
> is a:myPrp: it could be either a data or an object property. There are 
> several ways to fix this.
>
>  
>
> One possibility would be, when parsing O2, to also parse O1 and look 
> for typing statements. In this particular example, when parsing O2, we 
> should also parse O1 and, since O1 does not determine the type for 
> a:myPrp, we would raise a parse error. Had we spelled a:myPrp 
> correctly in O2, we would obtain the typing information from O1. This 
> solution really is very complex to implement (just imagine ontologies 
> with cyclic imports!) and is bad for performance. In fact, when I 
> implemented it in KAON2, I could not believe how hard it was.
>
>  
>
> To make writing OWL/RDF parsers easier, it seems that we should allow 
> each file to be parsed separately. Thus, in OWL 1.1 we would expect O2 
> to contain an explicit typing statement for each entity. Hence, we 
> should add to O2 the following triple:
>
>  
>
> (4)  a:myPrp rdf:type owl:ObjectProperty
>
>  
>
> The ontology O2 now contains all the information that we need to parse 
> it. Unfortunately, we now cannot detect the typo any more since 
> a:myPrp has been declared in O2! To summarize, if typing statements 
> are also declarations, then all objects are automatically declared in 
> the ontology that they are used in. This prevents us from detecting 
> typos, and this is more pronounced when we are using imports.
>
>  
>
> In order to fix problems such as the one presented here, in OWL 1.1 we 
> chose to separate the notion typing (which is just a helper for the 
> RDF parser and is actually not reflected in the structural 
> specification of OWL 1.1) from declarations (which are first-class 
> citizens in the structural specification) by introducing owl11:declaredAs.
>
>  
>
>  
>
>  
>
>  
>
> ----------------------------------------------------
>
> II: My interpretation of the discussion so far
>
> ----------------------------------------------------
>
>  
>
> If I am not mistaken, one of the main complaints about the existing 
> situation of OWL 1.1 was that we are not backwards compatible with OWL 
> 1.0. In particular, the problem arises if the original ontology 
> contains "naked" URIs (i.e.,  URIs that occur only in rdf:type 
> statements and not in some other axiom). According to the existing RDF 
> mapping, when you convert such an ontology into the structural 
> specification, you loose all "naked" URIs.
>
>  
>
>  
>
>  
>
>  
>
> ----------------------------------------
>
> III: A possible fix to the problem
>
> ----------------------------------------
>
>  
>
> In order to have a clear mechanism for checking for typos, I propose 
> to stick with declaredAs. The above example thus would not contain any 
> declarations, which, in fact, is compatible with OWL 1.0 (namely, OWL 
> 1.0 does not contain declarations, and checking for typos is virtually 
> impossible).
>
>  
>
> To prevent the problems that have been pointed out and which I 
> summarized in Section II, we could change the RDF mapping as follows: 
> If some URI x occurs in a triple that is not of the form <x, rdf:type, 
> owl:Class | owl:ObjectProperty | owl:DataProperty>, then do nothing 
> for x; otherwise, if x occurs only in such triples, then convert each 
> such triple into a corresponding declarations. Effectively, this would 
> mean that "naked" URIs would be considered to be declared in the 
> ontology that they are used in, whereas typing statements for 
> "non-naked" URIs are treated just as parsing hints.
>
>  
>
> This alone would have a drawback that reading an OWL 1.0 document 
> containing "naked" URIs would create declarations, which are not part 
> of OWL 1.1; thus, when you saved the document back to RDF, you would 
> not and up with OWL 1.0. To correct this problem, I propose the 
> following solution: When serializing an OWL 1.1 ontology into RDF, if 
> an URI x occurs only in a declaration, then we serialize the 
> declaration using rdf:type instead of owl11:declaredAs.
>
>  
>
>  
>
>  
>
> This solution seems to capture the intuition behind the typing 
> statements of "naked" URIs in OWL 1.0: such typing statements usually 
> are meant to be declarations. Furthermore, this solution allows us to 
> parse each ontology file by looking just at the triples in that file. 
> Finally, we still have a clean separation between typing and 
> declaration statements, which allows us to address situations such as 
> the one I outlined in Section I.
>
>  
>
>  
>
>  
>
> How do you feel about this proposal?
>
>  
>
> Sincerely yours,
>
>  
>
>       Boris
>
>  
>
>  
>

Received on Saturday, 4 August 2007 03:32:31 UTC