Re: Response to the review comments of the Syntax document, Sections 3--8

Hi Boris,

Basically, I am fine with all replies to my comments. Below are just
marginal notes.

Regards
Vojtech

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>@Vojtech, Section 3.5: We should perhaps make sure that 'annotating
>ontologies' in this context means '...ontologies as wholes'. How
>about using this extended formulation? Or, annotating individual
>entities or axioms is not 'annotating ontologies' in the general
>sense?

>I'm not sure I understand this comment. An ontology can be assigned
>an annotation, just like any other entity can. I don't
>understand what you mean with "annotating an ontology as a whole".
>
What I meant:
1) entities are parts of the ontology
2) so, annotating entities means annotating the ontology, in a sense?
In the semantic annotation field, a document is seen as annotated if text
fragments of it are annotated; it is not necessary to have annotations that
pertain to the document as a whole.

>@Vojtech, Section 4.6: "... a "copy" of the set of real numbers..."
>Single quotes ('copy') would be better?
>
>Throughout this specification, I've used American English, which is
>why we are using double quotes.

Good to know. My English is essentially (a humble form of) British. We use
double quotes in this role in Czech (and it is so e.g. in German afaik) but
had no idea the Americans adopted this as well.

>@Vojtech, Section 5: "annotation properties can be used to associate
>nonlogical information..." (similarly in 3.5). I do not
>strictly argue against such a shortcut in this spec... but just for
>completeness, I expect annotations to be used for pretty
>'logical' information as well - yet this information would not be
>expressible in OWL and thus not exploitable by tools merely
>relying on the DL semantics of OWL...
>
>The term "nonlogical" is inherited from knowledge representation: it
>means that the information is interpreted outside logic. This,
>of course, doesn't mean that the information itself is garbage; this
>latter sense, I believe, would be denoted by the term
>"illogical".

I did not mean 'logical' as 'not stupid'. My point was that the info in an
annotation can indeed have semantics in some solid logical calculus (but
different from the OWL species of DL) and be interpreted in an appropriate
reasoner. Therefore, ideally, I would prefer something like "...not
interpretable in the logical semantics of OWL". But if this sounds too
verbose to you, I will not insist on it.

>@Vojtech, Section 5.6.2: 'Analogous' (see also para 2 of Sect.5) is
>too vague a characterisation to me. Are blank nodes always
>interpreted as anonymous individuals when RDF is interpreted using
>the OWL semantics, or when aren't they?
>
>Anonymous individuals are always interpreted as blank nodes and, in
>fact, anonymous individuals are mapped to blank nodes in the RDF
>Mapping. Anonymous individuals, however, aren't blank nodes
>themselves: in RDF, blank nodes can occur in the schema part as
>well.
>Therefore, "analogous" here should be interpreted as "like".

Would thus harm to straightforwardly say "Anonymous individuals are
interpreted as blank nodes in RDF"?

>@Vojtech, Section 8.1.4: The naming goes against good practice here.
>Using the class name 'GriffinFamily' for the set of *members*
>of this family may confuse people a lot. Please, change to
>'GriffinFamilyMember' or so.
>
>I've changed the example to use a:GriffinFamilyMember; however, I'm
>not sure the original example was all that bad: a family is a
>set of people, isn't it?

First, in most ontological literature it is not. The concept of family has
much richer meaning than that of a set of family members.
Second and more important, an instance of the concept ('Whatever')Family
would normally be assumed to be a family and not an individual. A person is
a member (say, part) of a family and not an instance of the family concept.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Vojtech Svatek, University of Economics, Prague
Nam.W.Churchilla 4, 13067 Praha 3, CZECH REPUBLIC
phone: +420 224095495, e-mail: svatek@vse.cz
web: http://nb.vse.cz/~svatek

Received on Saturday, 13 September 2008 20:08:04 UTC