- From: Harshvardhan J. Pandit <me@harshp.com>
- Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2025 18:32:31 +0000
- To: semantic-web@w3.org
Hi All. While revisiting the OWL2 primer recently at https://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-primer/, I found several examples for showing how OWL2 works that try to model social constructs like man/woman, parent/child, father/mother in a way that I consider increasingly out of touch with today. I propose that these be changed to something that has no issues or over which no social, ethical, or political discussions are necessary for the adopter as the goal here is to show how OWL2 works. --- E.g. Sec 4.2 Suppose we also want to state that all mothers are women: SubClassOf( :Mother :Woman ) Here, it represents that mother is a strict subset of woman i.e. only women can be mothers. However, "Woman" here is referring to "woman as a human of female sex" and not "woman as gender". Rather than get into what these definitions should be, or what kind of sets exist and their intersections (e.g. woman, trans-woman, trans-man, intersex, and so on) - my point is that these are not good examples to start modelling with even if they might have been seen as "intuitive" some decades ago. --- E.g. Sec 4.3 For example, if we consider the classes Man and Woman, we know that no individual can be an instance of both classes (for the sake of the example, we disregard biological borderline cases)... DisjointClasses( :Woman :Man ) Again, we should not exclude anyone here just because they are 'on the fringes' and also because there are ways people can change their sex and their gender -- so this example is not a good example to use here. --- E.g. Sec 4.6 For instance, the statement that B is the wife of A obviously implies that B is a woman while A is a man. ObjectPropertyDomain( :hasWife :Man ) ObjectPropertyRange( :hasWife :Woman ) ... Having these two axioms in place and given e.g. the information that Sasha is related to Hillary via the property hasWife, a reasoner would be able to infer that Sasha is a man and Hillary a woman. While I don't know what is the canonical name for people who are not married (partner?) or who are in a same-sex/gender relationship -- this is again a good point to note that the example has implications beyond OWL and shouldn't be used here. --- E.g. Sec 5.1 The following example states that the class Mother consists of exactly those objects which are instances of both Woman and Parent EquivalentClasses( :Mother ObjectIntersectionOf( :Woman :Parent ) ) Again, this has more implications to consider such as transgender mothers and also motherhood following sex-change. Therefore, this is not a good example to learn about how OWL. We also have in Sec 10 SubClassOf( :Father ObjectIntersectionOf( :Man :Parent ) ) --- E.g. Sec 5.1 we could characterize the class of all parents as the union of the classes Mother and Father EquivalentClasses( :Parent ObjectUnionOf( :Mother :Father ) ) Parents are not exclusive to mothers and fathers e.g. stepmother or grandparent, or even non-biological parents (though they would be called the same). Further, it might be seen as saying parents are always a combination of a mother and a father - though this is not in the text or the rule. (I'll note that in Sec.9 the concept "SocialRole" is stated as a metaclass of Father, but isn't defined or explained) --- Is this change urgent? No. Is this outright offending anyone? I don't think so. But should we change this? Yes, I think so. Each year there will be many more new people and newer generations learning OWL, and many of us relearning it. So we shouldn't wait for this to be an issue either for being out of touch or for not being considerate before we change it. So what do we change this with? I think examples with animals (cats, dogs), shapes, etc. are universal, and aren't at risk of not conforming to society or for not being empathic. Or if we still want to model people, let's do friendships and work relationships that have no personal characteristics. For OWL specifically, I think the Pizza ontology used as a tutorial in Protege is also a good option as everybody likes pizza! (well, I hope). -- --- Harshvardhan J. Pandit, Ph.D Assistant Professor ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University https://harshp.com/
Received on Saturday, 15 March 2025 18:32:37 UTC