OWL use cases

 
Alan, et al,

  > alanr: I agree with Ian that we have a clear set of goals for the
  > language extensions (originally motivated from OWLED), but don't
  > want to close off new use cases. Given the timeline, if you think
  > there's something missing based on a use case
  > [http://www.w3.org/2007/10/10-owl-irc]

Here are a couple uses of OWL I think are important to support:

  - Specializing Class and Property.  This is critical to modeling
    manufactured products and processes, to ensure product and process
    models support subclassing, and classification of individuals (eg,
    individuals corresponding to actual cars and actual executing
    processes).  Current tools support this, but a message from Bijan
    (through Evan) said "owl:Class" in OWL 1 is part of the "disallowed
    vocabulary", ie, it can't be mentioned in an axiom, like one
    establishing a subclass.  Since instances of subclasses of owl:Class
    (Property) are classes (properties), it seems natural for these
    instances to be treated like any other class (property).

  - OWL Full, in particular, having Class and Property be nondisjoint.
  - RDF Statements (reified triples).
    These are important together for specializing product models with
    properties that "expand" to a network of other objects and
    properties in subclasses.  I've heard punning might work in OWL 1.1
    to make instances of both Class and Property, but haven't checked it
    yet, in particular whether it would support a common subclass
    between Class and Property.

Conrad

Received on Friday, 19 October 2007 20:48:18 UTC