Replace outdated social models in OWL2 primer

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