how many models of your ontology?

Suppose you have ontology, consisting of axioms and instance data, that:

* deals with a small finite domain;

* has constants for each element in the domain;

* has just 1 (binary) relation symbol;

* has no function symbols;

* uses a decidable fragment of FOL.


Do you care if the ontology has, literally, millions or billions of models?

I ask this in both an aethetic and a practical sense.

For instance, from an aesthetic point of view, I could see an argument
that says, "If you have millions or billions of models, then you didn't do a
very good job of writing axioms or populating the ontology with data tuples."
If this argument is pursued, where's the cutoff? A million? A billion?

>From a practical point of view, does the number of models ever enter into
consideration?

Jim

Received on Thursday, 11 November 2004 15:17:15 UTC