- From: Enrico Franconi <franconi@inf.unibz.it>
- Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2006 00:10:24 +0100
- To: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@isr.umd.edu>
- Cc: semantic-web@w3c.org, "Jeff Z.Pan" <jpan@csd.abdn.ac.uk>, Alan Rector <Alan.Rector@manchester.ac.uk>, owl@lists.mindswap.org
On 8 Jan 2006, at 21:54, Bijan Parsia wrote: > From various conversation with people who use OWL Full, and some > introspection, I see two primary, if only current, uses of higher > order like constructs (be they annotations, punning, or some more > full blown species of metamodeling): Metadata about the "symbolic > artefact", e.g., who wrote these axioms, when, when last modified, > etc. and for ontology alignment (e.g., I modeled Wines as a class > and you as an instance). I am not saying that these are the *only* > uses of higher order like constructs, but they are *in my > experience* what get mentioned. Only the latter has potentially > interesting modeling impact, and, in practice, people are just > happy to be able to *mark* these alignments and let some other > piece of software (usually not a reasoner!) take care of, e.g., > conversions of data between ontologies. Mmmhh, you are missing the *real* usages in the two biggest communities in informations system. In conceptual modelling, people do use metamodelling to characterise their object languages (I really don't like this, but this is a fact): see UML! In database systems, pleople use aggregation functions to characterise the values of properties of sets of tuples: see SQL! That is, you can have a property of a set of tuples defined in some way (e.g., average of the values of a property of all elements of the set of all tuples having some other property, etc). --e.
Received on Sunday, 8 January 2006 23:10:37 UTC