Re: Effects in OWL-S

Charlie Abela wrote:

> With all these ideas going on about preconditions and effects in OWL-S it is
> quite difficult to capture the general idea of how to define actual effects
> in WSs.
> 
> I had the impression that an effect was something that will become true when
> the WS has executed but that also brought some changes to the world, but now
> there is talk of making use of post-condition instead. Actually from the
> readings that I found, these two words seem to be used interchangeably,
> depending on the research context, and thus I always presumed that they are
> somewhat synonymous.
> 
> What are the views of the OWL-S ppl on this? Cause with all these somewhat
> radical changes being proposed it is quite difficult to get people to
> actually make use of these ontologies.

Hi Charlie -

I don't view the recent questions / suggestions (raised by me mostly) as 
radical.  They're mainly part of an effort to get greater clarity about 
how the "effects" property is to be used.  This effort has come up in 
the process of working on some new examples.  I sort-of suggested 
renaming "effect" to "postcondition" in OWL-S (because for me 
"postcondition" is more general), but that was not meant as a radical 
change.  And if most people view them as synonymous then it's not likely 
that we'll make that change.

Hopefully some additional discussion on this list will lead to greater 
clarity.

  Will there every be a stable set of
> OWL-S ontologies?

Sure.  I think most of the remaining "instability" has to do with these 
very things - expressing preconditions and effects - and we're making 
very significant progress in these areas for the next release.  (Note 
also that some of the instability has to do with the ongoing evolution 
of the rules language(s) that we're drawing on in these areas.)

Regards,
David

> 
> Some time back there was a long discussion on the topic; I guess some
> clarification is now due.
> 
> Regards
> 
> Charlie
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 14 April 2004 15:15:58 UTC