Re: the precondition property in OWL-S 1.0

At 17:55 10/11/2003 -0500, Drew McDermott wrote:
>It's not clear what your argument is.  Your suggestions for properties
>make sense, and may be the best set for interfacing to a
>constraint-based planner.  But if someone is concerned about some
>aspect of an activity that relates to the other 72 properties, what
>harm can it do to let them use more properties?
>Different applications could look at different subsets of properties
>and be pretty much oblivious to each other's concerns.


Good point Drew ... and yes definitely there should be separate properties 
for things that relay are semantically different.   But each time we add a 
property we should have a discussion on whether its REALLY a separate 
property or whether its just a special case of a more general type.

I was really trying to reduce the number of distinct properties by 
coalescing all the various things that we can relate to a broader notion of 
constraints on the activity.

My concern was that we had separate properties for preconditions, effects, 
inputs, outputs, etc. and I can assume we will need to add more variants of 
these to cover world state range constraints, resource constraints, 
spatial/location constraints, quality constraints, you name it.  So I was 
really arguing for ONE property called "(activity) constraints" that itself 
had ALL those things that can be considered as such to be specializations. 
Then systems could communicate, manipulate or in some cases reason about 
the whole set of constraints  - in some cases without being able to handle 
the details of what they mean. Multiple internal representation formats 
would be possible and extensions would be easier. This unification of 
concepts would give a simpler top level ontology for service descriptions 
that would help in communication of these service descriptions and 
reasoning or planning relating to these descriptions.

Austin

Received on Tuesday, 11 November 2003 05:53:05 UTC