Re: OWL Lite or DL?

On Tue, 2006-08-22 at 10:05 -0400, John Barkley wrote:

> I also think we should consider a recommended practice of using OWL Lite or
> DL where possible (i.e., when the knowledge base can be expressed in no more
> than DL).

I don't want to get into a religious war here, but I think the
advantages of OWL-DL are generally oversold.   The crux of the above
statement is what "can" be expressed in OWL-DL.

In my experience, many complex knowledge modeling projects benefit from
the use of metaclasses.  For example, if the domain of a relationship is
limited to several specific classes, it makes sense to model those
classes as members of a particular metaclass (i.e., one that supports a
particular slot type).   There are gyrations one can do to avoid
metaclasses (the GO/OBO folks have really been trying hard), but I think
that these load the knowledge models with counter-intuitive structures
for very little gain.  The "non-computability" of OWL-Full is a
worst-case problem that doesn't seem to me to have been a practical
concern in many real-world cases.

Larry

Received on Tuesday, 22 August 2006 16:28:39 UTC