completeness

Hi,

I thought I'd share some of my thoughts regarding completeness,  
scalability, & interoperability that might explain why I keep  
shouting "what do you mean by *scalable*"?

1) Even I can write a very scalable OWL DL query answering engine if  
it doesn't have to be complete: when asked to retrieve instances of a  
class C, it simply always only returns nothing...wait, I can even do  
better by returning "told" instances of C!

2) If we agree that (1) is sort of cheating, then we need to be more  
precise what "completeness" means: now, if we say "my engine will  
retrieve as many instances of C as it can manage in the given time",  
then we might get more than the told instances, but we could be  in  
trouble regarding interoperability: your engine could return a very  
different answer set from mine, since they have different strengths  
or optimisation techniques or,e.g., rule orderings.

So, what I would like to see as a clarification of "we can trade a  
bit of completeness for some scalability" is a description what  
*kind* of completeness we give up for (ideally) how much gain in  
performance.

Cheers, Uli

Received on Wednesday, 20 February 2008 19:54:08 UTC