- From: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
- Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2008 10:15:18 -0800
- To: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>
- Cc: Jeremy Carroll <jjc@hpl.hp.com>, Owl Dev <public-owl-dev@w3.org>
At 1:28 PM +0000 1/11/08, Bijan Parsia wrote: >On 11 Jan 2008, at 10:56, Jeremy Carroll wrote: >[snip] >>A) classes as instances >>======================= >>A class in one view of an ontology may be an individual in another. >>e.g. >>the class of Ford Motor Vehicle Models, may include the individual >>Ford Cortina; >>the class of Ford Cortina may include a particular car that I once >>owned (actually an untrue statement!). >> >>It can be argued that this is a modelling error. However, if so, it >>is a popular one. > >It also comes up in ontology integration and reconciliation (i.e., >you modeled something as a class, I modeled the same thing as an >instance, I'd like to merge our ontologies *first* and work with the >merged one where it's used both as a class and as an instance so >that I can better see the effects of changes as I work to reconcile >the points of view) Agreed, except that you seem to be assuming that there is some need to do work to reconcile the points of view. But why should there be? They may be entirely consistent. It seems obvious that classes can contain classes (and hence be instances). Certainly sets can contain sets, there is absolutely no doubt about that. So perhaps these two ontologies are already quite reconcilable. I see no need to talk of 'hacks' or 'escape hatches' here. The current SWeb methodology seems to be designed to create needless work when no work needs to be done. Pat -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- IHMC (850)434 8903 or (650)494 3973 home 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola (850)202 4440 fax FL 32502 (850)291 0667 cell phayesAT-SIGNihmc.us http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes
Received on Friday, 11 January 2008 18:15:29 UTC