- From: Francis McCabe <fgm@fla.fujitsu.com>
- Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 07:00:40 +0900
- To: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@isr.umd.edu>
- Cc: "Ugo Corda" <UCorda@SeeBeyond.com>, <public-sws-ig@w3.org>, Jack Berkowitz <jack.berkowitz@networkinference.com>
Ehem Notwithstanding the technologies being discussed, *translation* between ontologies is about as tractable in the general case as mapping between English and Japanese. However, an approach based on translating queries is, in principle, more doable than arbitrary mapping. Frank On Dec 12, 2003, at 2:59 AM, Bijan Parsia wrote: > > On Thursday, December 11, 2003, at 12:32 PM, Jack Berkowitz wrote: > >> Hi Ugo, >> >> This idea of making deductive logical inferences across ontologies is >> one of the principals of the OWL-DL flavor of the language. > > Actually, I'll make the stronger claim that this is true for all > flavors of OWL. > > What sort of inferences OWL Full supports is a trickier question :) > Via the LBase translation, you may well get all sorts of deductive > inferences, assuming you can pile enough metamodeling and mapping > axioms ontop. > >> You do it by establishing axioms that express equivalencies, >> sub-class, or other relationships between the two ontologies (or many >> more ontologies) and use a mechanism such as owl:import to provide a >> linkage. If you have an inferencing technology, then you can >> maintain logical consistency across these relationships. "Closeness" >> is a matter of interpretation and can be influenced somewhat by the >> form of the "bridge" axioms expressed. If ontologies are far apart >> -- ie different concepts -- the logic processor would not infer that >> they represent the same or similar things. > > There's also a fair bit beyond this in the current Description Logic > Literature alone, e.g., concept unification and matching, concept > approximation, Description Logics with similarity (see > http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-81/ > wolter-2.pdf), distributed description logics > (http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/504663.html), and cross connections > between kbs with differently expressive concept languages > (http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-81/ > wolter-1.pdf). > > Aside from more or less straight forward deductive (and related) > logical reasoning, there's some thought that "linking" between > ontologies (and kbs, and other things) might have some useful semantic > significance. This is a rather fluffier notion. > [snip] > > I'm just tipping the iceberg, of course :) > > Cheers, > Bijan Parsia. >
Received on Thursday, 11 December 2003 17:04:24 UTC