Re: Which kind of ontology is OWL specification?

At 1:00 PM +0800 1/2/04, wwmm wrote:
>Hi,
>
>Is  OWL specification a ontology?
>If so, Which kind of ontology is OWL specification?
>It is a representational ontology or task ontology?
>
>Yours sincerely


You ask a hard question - because it hinges on exactly what one 
defines as an ontology, a representational ontology, or a task 
ontology.  OWL is precisely specified in our documents and in a sense 
the only true answer to your question is "what is in the documents is 
what OWL is" --- that said, perhaps the following will be useful in 
helping you to answer your own question:
  1 - OWL minimizes the "content" component purposely (by charter) - 
in other words OWL is not a specific set of content, but rather a 
convention for expressing content.  There are some terms which are 
defined by OWL (or used consistently from RDF and RDF Schema), but in 
general it is meant to be a language for defining ontologies - not an 
"ontology" unto itself
  2 - OWL has been used in many cases to define what has sometimes 
been called a "representational ontology" where that means soemthing 
like a specification of physical entities and their relationships. 
Many good examples of this can be found in the DAML Ontology Library 
[1]
  3 - OWL has also been used to define "task" or "process" ontologies, 
where this term is used to mean a description of things in the world 
that change over time or a description of what the AI community has 
called in the past "planning operators."  The best example I know of 
this can be found in the OWL-S work, which aims to use OWL to provide 
semantics for Web Service applications [2].
  I hope this helps.
  Jim Hendler

[1] http://www.daml.org/ontologies/
[2] http://www.daml.org/services/owl-s/1.0/
-- 
Professor James Hendler			  http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler 
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-277-3388 (Cell)