RE: [OEP] OWL and Semantic interoperability

Thanks, Chris.

 

I was not going to talk about SWRL, other than to mention that it
addresses one of the key limitations of OWL for semantic
interoperability. I think it is quite important to talk about procedural
functions such as arithmetic and string manipulation because they are
important for many real-world interoperability solutions.  

 

What is the argument for NOT mentioning this as a key limitation? 

What you you say are the key limitations that ARE worth discussing?

 

Mike

 

Below is a revised outline of the note.

 

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 strengths are the ability to import, share and
reuse public ontologies (in whole or part) and the ability to express
logical equivalence between concepts, properties and individuals in
different ontologies. The main weakness is the lack of support for
procedural functions (e.g. arithmetic, string manipulation) that are
needed for mapping between many real-world ontologies.  

 

The main message is that while OWL provides a basis for achieving
semantic interoperability in a ceratain range of situations, it is no
silver bullet for the general problem of achieving semantic
interoperability.    The main limitations can be addressed by provision
of explicit support for procedural functions and an expressive rule
language.  Such functions are not efficient to implement in an inference
engine and need to be supported using built-ins. Technologies exist that
can provide such support (e.g. SWRL, Flogic engines); however they are
not standards.

OWL is an important  step forward, and there are more steps to go.

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Christopher Welty [mailto:welty@us.ibm.com] 
Sent: Monday, February 07, 2005 10:47 AM
To: Uschold, Michael F
Subject: Re: [OEP] OWL and Semantic interoperability

 


Mike, 

I agree with a reduction in negativity on the tone in the abstract, and
I think procedureally its out of scope to talk about SWRL.  I'd
recommend sticking to what OWL can and can't do.  Here's a slight
rewording for your consideration: 

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;  it is 
a step forward, but by no means the final step.

-Chris 

Dr. Christopher A. Welty, Knowledge Structures Group
IBM Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Dr., Hawthorne, NY  10532     USA

Voice: +1 914.784.7055,  IBM T/L: 863.7055, Fax: +1 914.784.7455
Email: welty@watson.ibm.com, Web:
http://www.research.ibm.com/people/w/welty/ 



"Uschold, Michael F" <michael.f.uschold@boeing.com> 
Sent by: public-swbp-wg-request@w3.org 

02/04/2005 08:34 PM 

To

<public-swbp-wg@w3.org> 

cc

<rector@cs.man.ac.uk>, Christopher Welty/Watson/IBM@IBMUS 

Subject

[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