Re: ISSUE-52 (Explanations): Specification of OWL equivalences and rewriting rules for explaining inferences

On Nov 5, 2007, at 8:31 AM, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
[snip]

> 3/ Although there has been work on explanation generation, I do not
>    believe that there is any consensus on how to present them to  
> users.

I'll go stronger: there is no evidence on what sorts of normalization  
and lemma generation are more helpful than confusing. We have field  
evidence about various presentation features in swoop, but there is  
still room for experimentation. I am, with Matthew Horridge,  
currently working on this, but I would not expect this research to be  
advanced enough for *any* kind of standardization for at least a  
year. (Though we should have reasonably preliminary results in the  
next few months.)

> 4/ Presenting extra information to users is largely a task of UI  
> tools,
>    so its inclusion in a language spec is problematic.

Furthermore, there is little need for standardization to promote  
dissemination. It's not like any of the tool vendors don't want this  
to work. It's mostly resource boundedness (e.g., Swoop like  
presentation is coming to Protege4 and OWLSight when we get time to  
do it). Having to work on standardization would only drain resources  
from that work.

Thus, we can't successfully do it at this time and trying to in this  
context slows actual, deployed improvement.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Monday, 5 November 2007 11:17:02 UTC