RE: exchanging OWL through RIF

Jim - thanks. My apologies in advance for my lack of understanding on the use of OWL...

>...  They or some other org decide they'd 
>like to use it on databases and datasets for datacleansing or other 
>"rule based" operation.
>    Recoding the whole into a new rules language would be 
>prohibitively expensive unless there is some sort of automagic 
>translator of some or all of the RDFS/OWL they use.

It would seem to me that this would be a case for exchange of OWL ontologies and/or interchange of different ontology representations (eg different varieties of OWL?). 

Or: are we talking about, say, some hospital publishing some rules for interpreting OWL (eg mapping OWL to a DB schema), which can then be interchanged / shared amongst other users of this ontology? And if so, what rule languages are typically applied to OWL vocabularies? 

Paul Vincent
Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor --- Business Rule Management
OMG Standards for Business Rules, PRR & BPMI
mobile: +44 (0)781 493 7229 ... office: +44 (0)20 7871 7229 

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Hendler [mailto:hendler@cs.umd.edu] 
Sent: Thursday, March 02, 2006 11:16 PM
To: Vincent, Paul D; edbark@nist.gov; Michael Kifer
Cc: RIF WG
Subject: RE: exchanging OWL through RIF
Importance: Low

Back before the group was chartered, I had shared some use cases for 
OWL meets Rules in various member lists.  One of the examples was:

At 19:52 -0400 6/5/05, Jim Hendler wrote:
>1 - Consider an organization like the  Natl Cancer Inst which has a 
>big OWL ontology (i.e. has a number of full time people working on 
>curation, versioning, etc).  They or some other org decide they'd 
>like to use it on databases and datasets for datacleansing or other 
>"rule based" operation.
>    Recoding the whole into a new rules language would be 
>prohibitively expensive unless there is some sort of automagic 
>translator of some or all of the RDFS/OWL they use.

This, I think, is more like what Ed was proposing.  I am afraid I'm 
not familiar enough with some of the things Paul says in this thread, 
but I think this pushes it a little further.   I can give more 
details of a cancer example, but it's a lot like what Ed talked 
about, but I don't need to postulate multiple organizations - all I 
need is one group doing "modeling" and another trying to use those 
models for "data related" ops (i.e. open world OWL meets Closed World 
rules)
  -JH


At 14:59 -0800 3/2/06, Vincent, Paul D wrote:
>I may be a little off base here, but: design-time model interchange 
>from say OWL to a (production) rules engine, where the (vocabulary) 
>"rules" would map to the object (/data) model the rules engine works 
>with, could in theory be covered by the ODM --> class diagram + PRR 
>mapping using MDA.
>
>[Caveat: The role of OWL in rule interchange seems (to me) to be 
>around describing the context (ie vocabulary) that the rules are 
>specified in. The target *must* already have its own ontology/data 
>to be mapped - after all, sending rules + data is not very useful 
>outside of verification tasks (as indicated in Harold Boley's F2F1 
>use case showing rules + data = results etc)].
>
>Another transformation that could possibly be done in RIF would be 
>OWL <-- --> SBVR, although again this is more likely to be a 
>design-time issue when in the context of conventional IT systems 
>(and again could also be done via an ODM <-- --> SBVR "model"). But 
>for ontologists / business consultants sharing vocabularies across 
>the semantic web, maybe this would be interesting.
>
>I await the OWL experts' views on this with interest!
>
>Paul Vincent
>Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor --- Business Rule Management
>mobile: +44 (0)781 493 7229 ... office: +44 (0)20 7871 7229 
>-----Original Message-----
>From: public-rif-wg-request@w3.org 
>[mailto:public-rif-wg-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Ed Barkmeyer
>Sent: Thursday, March 02, 2006 9:33 PM
>To: Michael Kifer
>Cc: RIF WG
>Subject: Re: exchanging OWL through RIF
>
>
>Michael Kifer wrote:
>
>>  I am having a second thought about the requirement that OWL should be
>>  exchangeable through RIF by encoding it in FOL (which I am guilty of voting
>>  for also and now attribute it to sleep deprivation :-).
>>
>>  I think this requirement is completely misguided.
>
>I think the above statement of the requirement can be misunderstood, but I
>don't think the intent is at all misguided.
>
>It is not a matter of "exchanging an OWL ontology"; the requirement is to
>deliver the semantic content of an OWL ontology as a ruleset, so that a rules
>engine can incorporate that content into its rulebase.
>
>A pseudo use-case: A given site "Uhu" using OWL ontologies and an OWL engine
>may find it necessary to communicate with a site "Rex" that has only
>"rulesets" and "rule engines" for some task in which Uhu needs the support of
>Rex.  In this case, it is important that Uhu be able to convert the relevant
>OWL ontology to a "rules" (RIF) form, so that it can be used by Rex in
>performing its supporting task.  And the requirement for RIF is that its "FOL
>subset" be able to capture the semantics of the OWL ontology.
>
>The alternative view of this scenario is that Uhu simply sends the OWL
>ontology, and it is incumbent on Rex to convert the OWL ontology to its
>internal "rules" form.  There is nothing wrong with this view, except that it
>has no role for RIF -- it makes the OWL->rules conversion a software project
>for the Rex engine, and another project for the ILOG engine, and another for
>the Jena engine, etc., creating lots of work for the engine providers and many
>third parties who are familiar with the proprietary rules forms.  By
>comparison, any tool that can convert OWL to RIF without loss (standard form
>to standard form) gives Uhu what is need to work with Rex, and also Rudi and
>Regina, no matter what rules engines they have.
>
>>  For interoperability, we will need to be able to send queries to OWL
>>  engines. Representation of those queries will need to be hashed out later.
>
>This is, of course, exactly the inverse use case.  Here the Rex site needs the
>assistance of the Uhu site in making some inference.  But Rex does not need
>RIF for this at all, only something like SPARQL.  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.)
>
>It seems to me that "Web-based Rules exchange" demands that we support BOTH of
>these two use cases, not just the latter.
>
>-Ed
>
>--
>Edward J. Barkmeyer                        Email: edbark@nist.gov
>National Institute of Standards & Technology
>Manufacturing Systems Integration Division
>100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8263                Tel: +1 301-975-3528
>Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8263                FAX: +1 301-975-4482
>
>"The opinions expressed above do not reflect consensus of NIST,
>   and have not been reviewed by any Government authority."

-- 
Professor James Hendler			  Director
Joint Institute for Knowledge Discovery	  	  301-405-2696
UMIACS, Univ of Maryland			  301-314-9734 (Fax)
College Park, MD 20742	 		  http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler
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Received on Friday, 3 March 2006 09:11:19 UTC