[OEP] OWL and Semantic interoperability

 At a recent OEP meeting Pat Hayes made some great points, and there was
some good discusion.  The following summarizes what was said, to the
best of my ability.   

*	many traditional prolbms of semantic interoperability will go
away with the Semantic Web, mainly because there is an infrastructure to
support semantic agreements (through publishing ontologies)  
*	the Semantic Web forces people to think about making thing
interoperable more than before, hence things will be better.
*	problems of semantic interoperability will go away to the extent
that people reference and re-use public ontologies in ways that are
consistent with their original intended use.
o	e.g. FOAF: mailboxOf , DC:author
*	Semantic Web provides not only the technical capability, but the
social motivation to resue concepts, so less translation will be
necessary 
*	Warning: reusing ontologies is hard, just like reusing software
code is hard. People reuse code in the wrong way. The Semantic Web makes
it likely that people will reuse [portions of] ontologies in incorrect
ways too.

Pat: can you please elaborate on this a bit, I'm sure I missed some key
things.

BTW: my current working abstract for the note is:

This note addresses the role of OWL in overcoming problems of semantic
heterogeneity.  We briefly characterize what we mean by semantic
interoperability, and what the challenges are. We describe some OWL
constructs that are designed to support semantic interoperability and
illustrate them with examples. We highlight their strengths and
limitations.  The main message is that OWL is no silver bullet for the
general problem of achieving semantic interoperability.  The support
provided is very limited.  Many of these limitations will be overcome by
the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) that is currently under
development.


Thanks
Mike

Received on Saturday, 5 February 2005 01:34:58 UTC