RE: nonmon mapping and punning

Hi Bijan!

Bijan Parsia wrote on March 06, 2008:

>On Mar 4, 2008, at 5:31 PM, Michael Schneider wrote:
>
>> [related to ISSUE-68]
>[snip]
>> I don't think that Jeremy really meant that it is technically  
>> impossible,
>> but more that it doesn't match the general concepts behind Jena,  
>> which is an
>> RDF framework after all.
>[snip]
>
>Which has specific support for specifically this sort of feature.  
>This is the part I don't understand.
>
>[snip]
>
>Michael...I'm sorry, but I don't quite see what all that had to do  
>with the reactive event framework. In particular, I don't quite see  
>why you detoured into the "OWL View" part of Jena.

Jena is only an example for an existing RDF-based system which will have to deal with the basic problem I was talking about. The real issue I see is with combining OWL-1.1-DL ontologies which are represented in RDF. The combination of ontologies becomes, for example, relevant when working with imports.

If I have two OWL ontologies given in RDF syntax, and I want to combine them into a single ontology, then I would expect that I can achieve this by simply building an RDF-merge from the two original ontologies. I would believe that, since the two OWL ontologies *look* like RDF, they should also be *usable* like RDF, at least at the *syntactical* level (I am not talking about semantics here). And since an RDF-merge is probably the most basic operation on RDF graphs, this would allow me to apply almost every available RDF framework to perform such a combination of OWL ontologies.

Currently, this simple approach does *not* work in order to combine two valid OWL-1.1-DL ontologies. Instead, I have to apply OWL specific knowledge to check and possibly manipulate the original RDF graphs before I can merge them. 

Note that I did *not* claim that this is a technical bug in the OWL-1.1-DL specification. I did also *not* claim that Jena or TBC cannot be adjusted to adequately combine OWL-1.1-DL ontologies. In fact, this is always technically possible by first inverse-mapping the two original ontologies to functional syntax, building the union of the two sets of axioms there, and then mapping the resulting functional syntax ontology back to RDF. But I fear that the missing option for simply RDF-merging two ontologies might have a negative effect on the general acceptance of OWL-1.1-DL in the Semantic Web.

Cheers,
Michael

--
Dipl.-Inform. Michael Schneider
FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik Karlsruhe
Abtl. Information Process Engineering (IPE)
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