- From: Jim Hendler <hendler@cs.umd.edu>
- Date: Sat, 17 Apr 2004 21:12:00 -0400
- To: "Uschold, Michael F" <michael.f.uschold@boeing.com>, "NANNI Marco FTRD/DMI/SOP" <marco.nanni@francetelecom.com>, "SWBPD" <public-swbp-wg@w3.org>
- Cc: "Ian Horrocks (E-mail)" <horrocks@cs.man.ac.uk>, "Clark, Peter E" <clarkp@redwood.rt.cs.boeing.com>, "Sean Bechhofer (E-mail)" <seanb@cs.man.ac.uk>
- Message-Id: <p06020407bca784ab1d34@[10.0.1.2]>
Mike - sometimes your responses make it clear to me that our use of the English langauge is defintiely through different ontologies... Your paper may well have been accepted (as were many other at last year's conference) if you'd used a non-web ontology langauge -- it wasn't accepted because you used D+O (as evidenced by the many rejected papers that did as well) -- but what is of interest to the RESEARCH community is highly different than the mission of a W3C Working Group that is aimed at "Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment" In fact, I would point to the following in the charter (a document that I sometimes wonder if everyone in the WG has read) Research topics are out of scope. (section 1.2.2 discussing the role of what is not the OEP group) Thus, the fact that you got the work you discuss below into ISWC is therefore prima facie evidence that we should be careful about considering it relevant to the work of this WG/TF -JH t 21:22 -0700 4/16/04, Uschold, Michael F wrote: Jim Hendler says: I guess it would be possible for using OWL separately from the Web, but that is sort of like talking about using HTML separate from the Web -- why would you want to? Seems a pretty borderline case. Here is your borderline case, and may help to explain the context of my earlier remarks. We wrote a paper that got accepted last year's ISWC conference that used DAML+OIL. The application had little if anything specifically to do with the Web, we just used DAML+OIL because it was an emerging standard ontology representation language, and we had a classification problem that was amenable to DL reasoning. DAML+OIL, of course evolved from OIL, which also had nothing specifically to do with the Web. I was hesitant to submit the paper on the basis of this dubious relevance. It smacked too much of "if your program is in lisp or prolog, then you must be doing AI". My co-authors over-ruled my concerns and I was proved wrong. The paper got accepted and I gave the talk to a room that was 80-100% full of people. The predominant situation does indeed seem to be that it if you use DAML+OIL (or OWL) then it must be relevant to the Semantic Web (or at least, be of interest to the Semantic Web community). Work on this project continues, and if we ever make it a Web application, that will be independent from our choice to use DAML+OIL/OWL. So, I guess we are not using any of the webby portions of OWL, and to date have not seen a need to (as far as I understand the webby vs. non-webby portions of OWL). See: <http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~horrocks/ISWC2003/UCDF03a.html>http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~horrocks/ISWC2003/UCDF03a.html -----Original Message----- From: public-swbp-wg-request@w3.org [mailto:public-swbp-wg-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Jim Hendler Sent: Thursday, April 01, 2004 5:24 AM To: NANNI Marco FTRD/DMI/SOP; SWBPD Subject: RE: philosophy of SWBPD (was Re: [OPEN] and/or [PORT] : a practical question) At 10:28 +0200 4/1/04, NANNI Marco FTRD/DMI/SOP wrote: Hello, Jim Hendler wrotes >In case anyone hasn't figured it out by now - I THINK IT SHOULD BE >OUT OF SCOPE FOR THIS TASK FORCE TO WRITE ONTOLOGY ENGINEERING >DOCUMENTS HAT ARE NOT RELATED TO THE SEMANTIC WEB as part of this >Working Group. If you'd like me to state it clearer, let me know > what to addd Do i understand well what you want to say : You think that, according to the formal definition of the term "Ontology", building an ontology doesn't automatically mean that you are in the SW context ? I think that also according to many informal definitions of ontology -- the Semantic Web is one particular place for ontologies If it is what you mean i completely agree with that because i think that , like Mr LAPALICE, we have been building Ontology since, as you say, 50 years without knowing it well, we've been calling them ontologies (Ala Gruber) since the mid 80s, although I first learned that term in my intro AI course in 1975 -- and I suspect others on this group go back further. Using a DL-like approach to ontologies probably dates back to KL-ONE by Brachman in the late 70s. But you also write : > They ARE central to the design of OWL, in the sense that OWL is > specifically FOR the Web, and thus had to have a few things that > typical KR/O languages lack. Do I have to understand that what i have written above is false if I use OWL (RDFS ?)? In other word if i use OWL/RDFS i'm automatically in the SW context (SWC) ? i think i can agree with that, but let me ask a more precise question : - Do you think that a use case (i don't want to use the word application) where somebody uses OWL ontologies without REASONING TASKS (classification, individuals retrieval, etc...)is still a SW use case ? Absolutely! In fact, I think someone using RDF with no explicit ontology at all is not only a SW use case, but the most important ones out there at the moment -- so let's not get too ontology-centric, although this discussion has gone there (i.e. I haven't seen anyone on this group mention that RDFS ontologies are being widely deployed and are covered in the OEP scope) - if yes : this raises a few very correlated new questions : - can we make a clear distinction between an OWL ontology built outside the context of SWC and an OWL ontology in the SWC ? I guess it would be possible for using OWL separately from the Web, but that is sort of like talking about using HTML separate from the Web -- why would you want to? Seems a pretty borderline case. - Are we able to define two distinct guidelines, both for OWL but - one for the more general OEC (which is clearly not our objective) - one for the specific SWC ? - In other word, (it's always the same question but more precise i think) : what are the differences between SWC and OEC ? Again - let's use the Web analogy -- people were building hypertext books long before Tim BL came along. He saw an approach where one used languages and protocols to link these together across computers in a new way, and the Web was born. Now, in a certain sense, we could say all Web applciations are Hypertext apps, but not all hypertext apps are Web apps -- and, hostory has shown, very little of the pre-Web hypertext stuff turned out to be the right best practices for the Web -- although certainly the people from that community who embraced the web were crucial in helping to identify good Web practices (and some still write articles today criticizing Tim's design and saying we could have done it better if we'd stuck with the earlier hypertext designs -- they claim the web might not be quite as large and society changing, but it would be designed more cleanly) - if not : to what context does it belong ? the general Ontology engineering context (OEC) i suppose ? And in this case do you think that these contexts have such a little intersection in terms of guidelines that there is no need for us to explore in details the OEC ? I think the OEC stuff has been explored in hundreds of papers and books and is a very rich literature. I don't see any advantage to my organization paying W3C fees so that we can participate in a traditional KR context - we can do that for free in our academic work. We hope this WG will concentrate on the work that helps make it easier for people to understand what the Semantic Web is and how to use it to solve their real-world problems. For me the direct consequence of this negative response is that the very "heavy" criteria (the only one perhaps ) to definitively distinguish the 2 contexts is the fact we need/use or not some reasoning tasks. Don't you think that by accepting this point of view, which is perhaps too much restrictive, we could have a simple "bodyguard" or (meta) guideline or whatever you want which could say to us : All the advices, guidelines,...we are going to write MUST be thought keeping this following final objective in the mind : our outputs MUST help people to build, in a given context, the best (distributed) architecture (i.e ontologies could be only a - very important - part of it) to allow some very specific reasoning tasks. I'm afraid that taking this point of view means that we have to kwow for the overall SWA lifecycle all the points which can have a real impact in REASONING capabilities. It's a hard work but perhaps that it is easier than the problem to say if this point or this point has to deal with OEC or SWC ? You will have understood that, my personal point of view is to make such simplification in our approach. Not perhaps this one exactly which is, i must admit, very very restrictive (and perhaps false ? glurps!!!) but which has the merit to define precise criterias to select the point to study. I sort of like the direction you're going, but I am not sure "reasoning tasks" captures it -- in particular, if I use a couple of inferences based on OWL in FOAF (for example, by making email addresses inversefunctional FOAF is able to tell information that is about the same person when gathered from different "Knows" relations ) is this "reasoning"? It does seem to me to be Sem Web and it does use a little inferencing, but it is definitely not classification, etc. Also, I don't think that something that uses a DL reasoner to classify data elements it is finding in RDF data would not count as a Sem Web application just because it uses a reasoner. However, I would agree that soemthing that uses a reasoner to help create OWL ontologies is not inherently a DL tool in itself (i.e. it doesn't necessarily "embrace the Web nature of OWL") but that is sort of like saying a browser is not really part of the Web since it only displays the hypertext -- it's a true statement in some sense (and browser design is very different than Web page design) but it doesn't make that much sense to consider HTML design and use without some idea of browsers in mind What I do agree with the most in the above is that we need to explicate the life cycle of Thank you very much best regards Marco NANNI -- Professor James Hendler http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies 301-405-2696 Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab. 301-405-6707 (Fax) Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 240-277-3388 (Cell) -- Professor James Hendler http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies 301-405-2696 Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab. 301-405-6707 (Fax) Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 240-277-3388 (Cell)
Received on Saturday, 17 April 2004 21:12:21 UTC