Re: OWL Lite or DL?

For this sort of modeling I would recommend, at least for the moment,  
some kind of macro facility.
Since my own tool is based on common lisp, and works off a version of  
the abstract syntax that is expressed as s-expressions, I can and do  
use the common lisp macro faciltiy to implement this sort of thing.

I started a thread about this on the OWL list in May suggesting that  
a macro language, which operates at the abstract syntax level, be  
considered for addition to OWL, but the consensus seemed to be that  
this should be outside the scope of OWL proper. I tend to disagree,  
because if this sort of thing is not standardized each tool will  
implement it in a different way.

http://lists.mindswap.org/pipermail/owl/2006-May/thread.html (top of  
the page: [OWL] Abstract syntax proposal )
Bijan Parsia suggested he may come up with some sort of proposal, but  
I don't know if he pursued this (http://lists.mindswap.org/pipermail/ 
owl/2006-May/000299.html)

Another way to think about it would be to embed, as annotation  
properties, information which could be used to augment an ontology by  
a postprocessing tool. As an example of this approach, there are a  
couple of pages off http://tinyurl.com/rhzto , in which I show  
examples of representing constraints that can't currently be  
expressed in OWL, to be interpreted by a second program.

-Alan

On Aug 22, 2006, at 12:28 PM, Larry Hunter wrote:

> 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 21:23:36 UTC