RE: English examples in the OWL 2 syntax specification

(I redirected this discussion to public-owl-wg, because I feel this is a more appropriate list.)

Hello,

Thanks a lot for this analysis -- it is certainly important to make the examples as consistent as possible.

Before I change the examples, though, I believe we need to decide on the purpose of the English examples. I included them into the
spec because I felt that many readers could benefit from an intuitive explanation what a particular axiom means. At first, I tried
not to use the actual OWL elements in the example; thus, I would explain an axiom

SubClassOf( a:Child a:Person )

with the sentence "Children are people". But then, some people complained about such paraphrasing of the axioms: they felt that this
was imprecise. Instead, they thought we should paraphrase this axiom as "Each instance of a:Child is an instance of a:Person as
well" -- that is, to use a more modeling-centric view. I updated much of the spec; however, I did not know myself what to do in many
cases. Thus, it is highly likely that the examples are inconsistent.

Now the question is really what approach to adopt. I still believe that having some kind of English explanation would be very
useful. I'd like to hear from others about what kind of approach to adopt there -- a more natural-language one or a more OWL-centric
one.

Thanks again -- I find this analysis really useful.

Regards,

	Boris 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-owl-dev-request@w3.org [mailto:public-owl-dev-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Kaarel
> Kaljurand
> Sent: 14 September 2008 20:26
> To: public-owl-dev@w3.org
> Subject: English examples in the OWL 2 syntax specification
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I extracted all the examples from the OWL 2 Syntax specification (a
> revision from
> the end of August) to see how the specification expresses the OWL
> axioms in English.
> After sorting the examples by the axioms, many irregularities in the
> English expressions
> were revealed. I think most of the irregularities are unintended/unwanted.
> 
> See the report:
> 
> http://www.cl.uzh.ch/kalju/ontologies/OWL_spec/owl_spec_examples.html
> 
> --
> kaarel

Received on Sunday, 14 September 2008 20:01:16 UTC