RE: [OEP] Comments on Specified Values Note

Alan,

Just a few inline comments. Search for [MFU]
I snipped a lot of stuff.

Mike


-----Original Message-----
From: Alan Rector [mailto:rector@cs.man.ac.uk] 
Sent: Tuesday, March 01, 2005 9:52 AM
To: Uschold, Michael F
Cc: public-swbp-wg@w3.org
Subject: Re: [OEP] Comments on Specified Values Note


Mike, All

Many thanks for the detailed comments.  There is a revised text at ????.
I hope I have followed most of the advice. I respond to the comments in
line where I have deliberately not done so. .

"Uschold, Michael F" wrote:
> Pattern 2 should come before pattern 1 because:
> 1. it is simpler
> 2. it has some disadvantages that are addressed by pattern 1, which is

> a nice way to motivate pattern 1. 3. it fixes the minor problem that 
> the note [1]  refers to a pattern that has not been discussed yet, 
> making it hard to understand.

I agree in principle but not in practice.  Pattern 2 is what people
expect.  If we put it before pattern 1 there is a serious danger that
people will read no further. I'll take the group's advice on this one,
but I would leave them in this order by preference.

[MFU] Flippant response: What is the danger? So what if they don't read
further, if the first one works for them, then so be it. 
Serious response: Ok, so lets assume we really DO want them to read
further. You can easily introduce the two options by saying something
like:
"We introduce two patterns; the first is a simple and obvious one, but
it has problems. The second one is more complex, and addresses the
problems." Viola.

>
> It may be worth mentioning that the pairwise disjoint axioms will be 
> exponentially explosive if ther are more than a few values. What to do

> then? Is the reader to think that they have to creates dozens or 
> hundreds of disjointness axioms?

I'll put this in a note.  This is a major awkwardness with the OWL spec.
There is an allDifferent but not an allDisjoint axiom.  The logicians
aren't bothered because there is a work around - which we will work into
the tools in the near future.  Hopefully future versions of OWL will fix
this. (It isn't theoretical, we have had relatively modest ontologies
blow up beyond the 1.5Gig Windows limit because they numerous flat lists
of 20-100 pairwise disjoint classes.  Since we would argue that this is
often good modelling style, the temptation to implement the OWL spec
literally has to be avoided by tool makers.  We need a note on this
soon.

[MFU] does it really need a whole note? Would only be a few pages, if
so.
>
> In short, I don't see an A/B comparison for the whole example. This 
> might be confusing. I'm offline now, perhaps this is clear in the code

> referred to at the end of the note in all the different syntaxes.
>
> It might help to have a figure for this variant, which shows the lack 
> of the healthy_person class.
>
> PROBLEM: are there any good diagrammatic conventions for representing 
> an anonymous restriction class? An early version of Network 
> Inference's editor, Construct had a convention that I found terribly 
> confusing. There may be no ideal solutions, each will have problems. 
> You want the class it self to look like all other classes, so it 
> should be an elipse, but you also want to indicate how it is defined 
> too.
>
> IDEA; for the future.  Future ontology editing tools may provide 
> exlicit support for these ontology patterns, making it unnecessary to 
> remember the boring bits, only their 'parameters'. e.g.  One could 
> have the exponentially many disjoint axioms created automatically by 
> saying a set of things are all mutally disjoint.
>
> 'quality space' is a new term, is it needed? What abot the term 'value

> space' to refer to the space of possible values? Ive seen that term 
> used.
>
> "of discrete value" --> "of discreate valueS"
>
> Considerations using Pattern 1:
> * I suggest reorder them to indicate pros first and cons last.. There 
> wasa much heated debate about making judgments, but when taken by 
> themselves, most of these poits are clearlyl desirable or not.  Who 
> would prefer for inferences to NOT work properly?  Who would argue 
> that being NON-intuitive is a good thing?
> * there is not an anonymous instance here, there is an anonymous class

> (well ok, it is an instance of the meta-class OWL:Class, but that 
> misses the point)
>
> "an unique" --> "a unique"  (may be ok both ways)
>
> Remove parens form the remark about unique name (or is it nameS) 
> assumption. Prefix the sentence with "Importantly, "

[MFU] You failed to comment on any of this. You studiously responded to
everything else. Any particular reason? I'm curious to know your views
on representing restriction-defeined classes digramatically.

--
Alan L Rector
Professor of Medical Informatics
Department of Computer Science
University of Manchester
Manchester M13 9PL, UK
TEL: +44-161-275-6188/6149/7183
FAX: +44-161-275-6236/6204
Room: 2.88a, Kilburn Building
email: rector@cs.man.ac.uk
web: www.cs.man.ac.uk/mig
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Received on Tuesday, 1 March 2005 21:16:50 UTC