Re: FLOWS and URI

Bijan,

I'm not sure I understand your question, but let me respond and if
I haven't answered your question, please let me know!

The objective of FLOWS was to develop a FOL ontology describing
Web services.  We did it (or at least we did a reasonable first pass
at it.  There are lots of things we'd like to expand upon.)  FLOWS
is an FOL ontology of Web services.

--- Begin Aside (FLOWS background) -------------------------

As an aside for those of you who don't know much about FLOWS [1], one
of our objectives was to provide an ontology for Web services that
- addressed some of the representational short-comings of OWL-S, and
- that was created in a sufficiently expressive language so that the
  models (interpretations) of the ontology reflected the intended
  interpretation of the ontology.  Note that this was not the
  case w/ OWL-S.  OWL was not sufficiently expressive to represent
  the Web service process model.  While OWL (and thus OWL-S) had
  a well-defined semantics, the interpretations of the OWL-S ontology
  allowed some unintended interpretations.  So...the semantics of
  the OWL-S process model is specified by a translation to more expressive
  languages and also by suggestive syntax and the english language
  description in adjoining technical documents.

(Always lots more to say, but I'll leave it at that)

---End Aside ----------------------------------------

OWL (and thus OWL-S) ontologies are Web documents and thus can be
referenced by means of a URI.  As such classes, properties, individuals
in OWL ontologies are all associated with URIs.

If we wish to make FLOWS or a Web-variant of FLOWS into a Web document
(and there are lots of reasons for doing this) then it would make
sense to define concepts using URIs.  Nevertheless, that was not
our primary objective.

- Sheila


[1]   http://www.daml.org/services/swsf/1.0/swso/



======================================================================
 Sheila McIlraith --  Dept of Computer Science, University of Toronto
 www.cs.toronto.edu/~sheila -- sheila [at] cs [dot] toronto [dot] edu
 Phone: 416-946-8484  --  Fax: 416-978-1455
======================================================================



On Thu, 15 Sep 2005, Bijan Parsia wrote:

>
> On Sep 15, 2005, at 1:11 PM, Sheila McIlraith wrote:
>
> > Ryu,
> >
> > That's correct.  The purpose of FLOWS was to develop of first-order
> > logic ontology for Web services.  We do not (yet) use URIs to specify
> > concepts.
>
> I don't understand the dialectical point of the second sentence. Even
> in developing a FOL ontology for Web services, it might be nice to have
> URIs for the specific concepts to serve as a common terminological
> basis for various encodings in Semantic Web languages.
>
> If it's just, "We didn't get round to it and KIF doesn't make it easy
> or inevitable out of the box" well, that's ok, of course :)
>
> Cheers,
> Bijan.
>
>
>

Received on Thursday, 15 September 2005 17:38:56 UTC