OWL Full consistency advances

Hi

With Dave Turner, I've made some progress on the OWL Full consistency issue.
Please see the three papers attached to:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2008May/0053

There is intended to be a reading path for non-mathematicians.

Abstract:

We show that OWL1 Full without the comprehension principles is 
consistent, and does not break most RDF graphs that do not
use the OWL vocabulary. We discuss the role of the comprehension 
principles in OWL semantics, and how to maintain the relationship 
between OWL Full and OWL DL by reinterpreting the comprehension 
principles as permitted steps when checking an entailment, rather than 
as model theoretic principles constraining the universe of 
interpretation. Starting with such a graph we build a Herbrand model, 
using, amongst other things, an RDFS ruleset, and syntactic analogs of 
the semantic “if and only if” conditions on the RDFS and OWL vocabulary. 
The ordering of these steps is carefully chosen, along with some 
initialization data, to break the cyclic dependencies between the 
various conditions. The normal Herbrand interpretation of this graph as 
its own model then suffices. The main result follows by using an empty 
graph in this construction. We discuss the relevance of our results, 
both to OWL2, and more generally to a future revision of the Semantic 
Web recommendations.


For people near Bristol UK, I will be giving a talk on this work next 
Wed afternoon. e-mail me for details.

Jeremy

Received on Wednesday, 21 May 2008 11:07:43 UTC