Re: [OWL] annotations and meta-modelling in OWL 1.1

On 9 Jan 2006, at 14:12, Bijan Parsia wrote:
>> It is not present in standard conceptual modelling languages  
>> (e.g., EntityRelationship E/R data model) for historical reasons  
>> (they came before SQL). It has a minor presence in UML (the  
>> association with a diamond at one end) - but UML was not conceived  
>> as a database conceptual modelling language. There is *plenty* of  
>> proposals for extension of the E/R data model (and for UML) to  
>> model conceptually aggregations, and all the conceptual modelling  
>> tools I know about have some (non-standard) hook to model  
>> aggregation.
>
> With no clear winner. We're not talking overall utility or  
> significance, but what has the right balance between utility, ease  
> of marketing, and easy implementability. For *1.1*, treading where  
> there is non-standardness elsewhere seems a little off target.  
> Plus, there is no proposal on the table.
>
> (This seems critical to OWL 2.0 as is a more elaborate form of  
> metamodeling, but it doesn't seem to be a nigh trivial win.)

I'd like to emphasise my point of view:

1) aggregation as meta-modelling facility is ubiquitous and very  
relevant for conceptual modelling.

2) Nonetheless, I believe that OWL-DL is not at the stage of devising  
a *standard* supporting properly meta-modelling for aggregation,  
since there has been little discussion about that. My favourite  
proposal would stem (of course!) from [1] (top hit in <http:// 
scholar.google.com/scholar?q=franconi%20sattler>, with 34 citations),  
already implemented in ICOM.

3) If an extension to OWL-DL supporting aggregation will ever see the  
light, I'm sure that there will be a widespread use of it.

> I think ICOM is a wonderful tool, but what I *don't* see is that  
> it, or things like it, are widely used. My *personal* strategy  
> would be to revive ICOM and try to build a user base for it (or get  
> one of the vendors to sell it).

We are coming out with a wonderful new release (how many times have I  
already said that?:-))
Compatible with OWL etc. But, we killed the aggregation part - lack  
of time :-(

>>  I wonder whether people in the SWBP WG came up with such a  
>> modelling requisite.
>
> Good question.

Ehi: somebody from SWBP out there?

cheers
--e.

[1] Enrico Franconi and Ulrike Sattler (1999). A Data Warehouse  
Conceptual Data Model for Multidimensional Aggregation. Workshop on  
Design and Management of Data Warehouses (DMDW'99), Heidelberg,  
Germany, June 1999.

Received on Monday, 9 January 2006 14:07:30 UTC