Re: Relation between OWL and OWL-S

> [Daniela Claro]
> Thus my question is how can I differentiate two individuals (services) like
> river bank and economical bank in OWL-S? Actually how can I differentiate
> two ambiguous individuals (services) in OWL-S?

I think you are still confused about where natural language ends and
internal representation begins.  Internally all we have to do is use
two different symbols, and the two entities are "differentiated."
(The two names can be made different just by having one be
fluvial:bank and the other be mercantile:bank.)  We can give them
different properties, but a KR system can believe two entities are
different even if it doesn't know any properties that differentiate
them.  Or we can avail ourselves of a really simple difference;
for instance, we can declare that economic_entity is disjoint from
geographic_entity, so all pairs of objects drawn from economic_entity
x geographic_entity are given distinguishing features, because one has
the feature "is an economic_entity" and the other has the incompatible
feature "is a geographic_entity".

If these gimmicks leave you feeling dissatisfied, then I think it's
because you're really thinking of the natural-language problem.  If
the end-user _types_ the symbol "bank," how do we figure out which
meaning was intended?  If the user sees "bank" in a menu, how do we
know he or she realizes which meaning was intended in the context?
How do we know if the end-user even _knows_ that there is a potential
problem with the symbol?

These are difficult issues, but Owl and Owl-S can't help with them,
except to help with low-level chores such as verifying that both
meanings of "bank" are consistent with what the user has said so far.

                                             -- Drew

Received on Saturday, 27 November 2004 03:51:40 UTC