Re: exchanging OWL through RIF

Michael,

Obviously we disagree.  I leave it at that.

One clarification.

I wrote:

>>But suppose that Rex needs 
>>to send this ruleset to Regina, so that Regina can use its local KB to assist 
>>Rex in making some inferences.  Then when Rex sends the RIF ruleset to Regina, 
>>the SPARQL queries to Uhu that appear in some of the antecedents must have a 
>>RIF representation.  (And I think this is in some sense the degenerate case. 
>>It is entirely possible that Regina is a 'hybrid' site, combining both DL and 
>>Rules reasoning capabilities, with the consequence that Regina wants to 
>>"understand" the SPARQL query, not just blindly send it to Uhu.)
> 
> "Understand" the sparql query? Are you talking about meta-reasoning about
> rule programs? You are dragging the whole thing into the direction of
> impossible or, at least, of something that is well beyond the current
> technologies.

No.  What I meant was:  Since Regina-the-hybrid has some associate DL 
reasoner, and the SPARQL query presumably involves "terms" (URIs) and DL/RDF 
concepts that may be meaningful to Regina's associated DL reasoner, given the 
DL ontologies available to Regina, Regina may want to process the embedded 
SPARQL query thru Regina's DL side, with whatever consequences that has for 
Regina's KB.  If the RIF model of the query is "send this XML string to Uhu 
with two 'macro' substitutions", Regina won't be able to tell SPARQL from 
JDBC, and can't profit locally from the results.

I am willing to agree that this is "forward-looking", but frankly the whole 
idea of RIF having to interwork with OWL and RDF reasoners in any regard is 
"forward-looking".  And it is not at all clear to me what kinds of swallows 
will first nest under that roof.

> The exact form of RIF to OWL/RDF queries is yet to be determined, but I
> doubt that they will be some kinds of translations from SPARQL or OWL to RIF.
> More likely they will resemble current interfaces from rule languages to
> databases.

I would agree with this, and I certainly wouldn't expect more from phase 1, 
but it seems to me that when Francois Bry and I postulated this a month ago, 
we were 'roundly abused' by some other "forward-looking" members of the WG.
It seems that no view of the future is widely held. And that's probably a good 
thing. ;-)

-Ed

-- 
Edward J. Barkmeyer                        Email: edbark@nist.gov
National Institute of Standards & Technology
Manufacturing Systems Integration Division
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Received on Thursday, 2 March 2006 22:52:55 UTC