Re: FLOWS and URI

On Sep 15, 2005, at 1:38 PM, Sheila McIlraith wrote:

>
> 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.

I completely understand that :)

[snip]
> 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.

You published a web document about it. You intend for it to be used to 
describe web services. I believe you intend it to be used to put 
descriptions on the web.

Even without the latter, it's clear that you have a list of terms. 
Those terms could have associated URIs. This isn't *defining* the 
concepts using the URIs, it's just giving each concept a URI.

For example, you have URIrefs for each section, e.g.,:
	http://www.daml.org/services/swsf/1.0/swso/#service-sec

A simple naming scheme would have been to use
	http://www.daml.org/services/swsf/1.0/swso/#service

To represent the concept, and content negotiation to get the HTML, or 
the KIF, or the CL, or the OWL, or the SWSL-Rules variant of the 
definition of that cocnept.

In other words, I think the justification that the objective was other 
than to make it web accessible doesn't touch the reasonable point that 
in your document you could have provided URIs easily and naturally.

In a sense, the complaint can be registered about your document, not 
your ontology per se.

And there is a perfectly on point answer: We didn't get around to that. 
But given that 1) it's the *semantic web* services ontology and 2) 
there are *two* formalizations in proposed semantic web languages 
(SWSL-FOL and SWSL-Rules), it's sort of astonishing that you didn't 
have URIs!

Maybe it isn't in the end important...but...it is weird.

Furthermore, if I go to the overview:
	http://www.daml.org/services/swsf/1.0/overview/#roadmap
"""The complete axiomatization is given in first-order logic, using 
SWSL-FOL, with a model-theoretic semantics that specifies the precise 
meaning of the concepts. """

"""More specifically, SWSL is a general-purpose logical language, with 
certain features to make it usable with the basic languages and 
infrastructure of the Web. These features include URIs, integration of 
XML built-in types, and XML-compatible namespace and import 
mechanisms."""

Now, I understand that SWSL and SWSO were in development concurrently, 
but the axioms *are* encoded in both SWSL-FOL and SWSL-Rules.

Cheers,
Bijan.

P.S. I do like FLOWS :)

Received on Thursday, 15 September 2005 18:04:47 UTC