- From: Ian Horrocks <ian.horrocks@comlab.ox.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2008 21:35:13 +0100
- To: W3C OWL Working Group <public-owl-wg@w3.org>
The idea we came up with on the teleconf was to say that implementations MUST issue a warning when they can't be sure about a False answer, and to add that implementations not wanting to check the conditions could simply return Unknown instead of False. On closer examination, this doesn't make total sense and/or seems unnecessarily complicated. In the first place, it is strange to say that implementations MUST do something, and then say that they can do something else instead. In the second place, it doesn't seem to make much sense to return False with a warning that this answer can't be trusted -- surely it would be much more sensible to return Unknown under these circumstances. This would allow the conformance conditions on OWL RL checkers to be greatly simplified, i.e., to say that they can only return False when the entailment doesn't hold (just like for the other checkers). We could then add a note for implementers pointing out that Theorem 1 tells them just when it is safe for rule-based implementations to return False (when the conditions are satisfied and the entailment isn't found by the rules). The note can also say that if they don't want to implement the check they can simply avoid returning False. To make this clearer/more concrete, I implemented this in the Conformance document [1]. Still to do: add something about what this would mean in the case of query answering, to the effect that a warning MAY/SHOULD/MUST be issued if "Unknown" would be the answer to any relevant entailment problem. No doubt you will let me know what you think. Ian [1] http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/Conformance
Received on Wednesday, 3 September 2008 20:35:59 UTC