Re: Punning discussion

From: Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>
Subject: Punning discussion
Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 03:20:39 -0500

> 
> Hi folks,
> 
> I was talking with Ian about some discussion points and questions to  
> help structure the conversation we will have on punning. We came up  
> with the following:
> 
> 1) Consider the punning issue to be divided into two kinds of  
> punning. The first kind adds instance punning against classes and  
> properties. In some sense this is the most easily understood kind of  
> punning and those for which there are obvious use cases. The second  
> kind are the other punning pairs - class/property, objectproperty/ 
> dataproperty. Is it worth considering these separately? Do we have  
> any kind of consensus that one or both are desirable/useful?

>From OWL S&AS, an ontology with separated vocabulary (i.e., punned)
1/ does not use any name are more than one of a class ID, a datatype ID,
an individual ID, an individual-valued property ID, a data-valued
property ID, an annotation property ID, an ontology property ID, or an
ontology ID;
2/ types every individual in the ontology; and 
3/ (among other things) does not use any of the syntax vocabulary.

So, there are other kinds of punning, including
1/ punning the syntax vocabulary
2/ punning individuals with ontologies
3/ more than 2-way punning

Each and every punning kind admits more RDF graphs as OWL 1.1 (DL)
ontologies so there is a technical reason to allow all punning.

[...]

> 3) From a technical point of view, how would dropping some or all of  
> punning help? To what extent is the amount of new vocabulary  
> dependent on our choice of punning? How does punning effect OWL Full?

Punning does not effect OWL Full.  Neither does it affect OWL Full.

The extra vocabulary is useful to locally disambiguate OWL written in
RDF triples.   

> 4) From a communication/understandability/documentation point of  
> view, how would our choices effect the communities that we want to  
> use OWL. What is the extra documentation needed to explain punning?  
> How much would eliminating or reducing punning help? What's the  
> appropriate balance of cost/benefit?

Any punning requires explaining that the different uses of a name do not
interfere with each other.  One could do this once for a particular kind
of punning, once for each kind of punning, or just use the general
wording just above.

[...]

> Looking forward to the discussion,
> 
> Regards,
> Alan

peter

Received on Tuesday, 22 January 2008 17:21:30 UTC