Re: Enhancing object-oriented programming with OWL

Onsdag 12 september 2012 01:22, skrev Enrique Pérez Arnaud:
>  I disagree :) traits, aspect orientation, behaviours, these are tools
> designed to encourage code reuse in large frameworks, and they don't have
> the inner structure that is needed in this case. In the same way as the
> class system (OO) has the inner structure that is needed (and was also
> designed for code reuse). The initial simplicity given by OO is not worth
> the complication of injecting into it a more general deductive system. I
> would say that the more general deduction system should be the core, and
> then, you might add shortcuts into it, such as a class system.

Hmmm, I wonder if we actually agree. :-) I'm not quite sure, though.

Based on my earlier life as semweb software engineer, I had noted that 
developers, both with and without semweb background lacked tools in the 
toolchains to do stuff beyond simple generic browsing, and that the 
generation of classes (using e.g. a metaobject protocol implementation) at 
runtime would be a very interesting way to let them work with RDF data. 

Then, I came to realize that single inheritance is too inflexible and 
multiple inheritance, is, to be brief, too scary. My old example is: "say, 
you have a car and a boat, and reasonable implementations of those. Then an 
amphibious vehicle comes floating [sic!] by." The idea is that even though 
you have not anticipated the existance of such a thing when writing the Car 
and Boat classes, there exists most likely a composition of methods already 
implemented that would be useful and that you might be able to make that 
composition by using reasoning. I didn't intend to say that a general 
deductive system would be the right tool for the job (though I acknowledge 
that what I said might be interpreted that way), but that OWL reasoning 
might be able to do this for us.

There has been some work that seem to have shared this vision, but I'm not 
aware of any research that have been fruitful. I admit that since my own 
research is very far from this, I have not been paying close attention, but 
what I'm saying is that it is a very interesting topic, and I'd be 
interested in references on the subject. 

Cheers,

Kjetil
-- 
Kjetil Kjernsmo
PhD Research Fellow, University of Oslo, Norway
Semantic Web / SPARQL Query Federation
kjetil@kjernsmo.net           http://www.kjetil.kjernsmo.net/

Received on Wednesday, 12 September 2012 12:06:44 UTC