Re: comments on RDF mapping

From: Jim Hendler <hendler@cs.rpi.edu>
Subject: Re: comments on RDF mapping
Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2007 11:55:32 -0400

> 
> FWIW, I think annotations were one of the real contributions of the  
> original OWL WG in a way that was somewhat unexpected.  For many  
> years the workaround for many DL systems to handle the need for non- 
> inherited classes was to create a special instance associated with  
            ?? information ??
> each class, and to use that to store the specific properties related  
> to the class - and of course the "reasoning" associated with this  
> happened to some extent outside the reasoner -- i.e. the application  
> knew how to use these.

By "reasoning" do you mean GUI stuff, or is there some other sort of
reasoning that you think needs to go on?  Perhaps you mean things like
reference numbers, etc., as below, but these things *are* outside the
reasoner.

>   With the invention of annotations, suddenly there was a clean place  
> to put this - for example, the National Cancer Institute's ontology  
> uses annotations for things like unique reference numbers on various  
> class names -- a non-semantic class that is still crucial for their  
> applications (links the class names back to pubmed and such).  This  
> has also been used in several cases I've seen to provide a link  
> between class names and other URIs that wouldn't necessarily be  
> inherited (or might necessarily not be inherited) - for example, one  
> ontology I like is one someone in the UK did (sorry, I've lost the  
> pointer) where they associated classes from some well-known  
> ontologies  with flickr terms that corresponded - so Cyc:cat could be  
> linked to flickr's photos of cats (this was done by hand, so where  
> terms were unambiguous, the pictures could be used to show a novice  
> which definition of the term was being used -- i.e. milont:tank could  
> be linked to photos of M1s rather than fish).

>   Anyway, this is a long way to say that I second the idea that we  
> might want to revisit annotations w/respect to allowing a "minimal"  
> semantics to them - so it woudln't break DL implementations, but  
> would allow this feature to be more widely used by tools.

What sort of semantics?  One problem with the OWL 1.0 semantics for
annotations is that it gives meaning to annotations.  If you change an
annotation, then that interferes with entailment (for classes or axioms
or ontologies).

What sort of tools?  Meaning-free annotations allow GUI/ontologye tools
to hang non-logical stuff on entities without having to worry about
interfering with entailment.  This should help uptake of annotations by
GUI/ontology tools.

>   -JH

peter

Received on Tuesday, 30 October 2007 16:55:07 UTC