- From: Robert Stevens <robert.stevens@manchester.ac.uk>
- Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 21:45:28 +0100
- To: Phillip Lord <phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk>,public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org
There's another answer of using the reasoner by building your ontology to take advantage of its capabilities. the conceptual lego approach relies on the reasoner. Anecdotally, I've managed to miss out subsumption relationships by hand in ontologies as small as a dozen classes. Also, when building purely by hand, I've seen people introduce inconsistencies by asserting multiple inheritance across disjoint classes. I would feel nervous at saying "there is a point when you need a reasoner", but I think building to take advantage of it is as close as I can get. robert. At 11:46 26/10/2006, Phillip Lord wrote: > >>>>> "Alan" == Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com> writes: > > Alan> Well it would be educational to get your view on what you can > Alan> you do with owl without a reasoner that's not easier to do > Alan> without owl? > > >You can do lots of things with OWL without a reasoner. The Gene >Ontology is representable in OWL, for example, and uses a simple >enough expressivity that you could do without a reasoner easily >enough. Of course, you need to use some kind of "reasoning" engine, >but something which understands transitive closure is enough. > >Whether it's "easier" to do without OWL depends on what the >alternatives are. You could also represent GO style semantics in RDF >(although, I think, the existential nature of part_of would not be >explicit), or indeed anything else capable of representing a >graph. > > Alan> And how are you to know when you do need the reasoner and when > Alan> you don't? > >When you use enough of the expressivity of OWL, where "enough" is >relatively undefined. > >Phil
Received on Thursday, 26 October 2006 20:45:53 UTC