Re: Replace outdated social models in OWL2 primer

so 15. 3. 2025 v 19:37 odesílatel Harshvardhan J. Pandit <me@harshp.com>
napsal:

> 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).
>

There's always a few edge cases in W3C specs.  For example, even defining
the "Person" can be problematic, through a certain lens.

If enough people want to fix it, they can, or perhaps we can vote on it.


> --
> ---
> Harshvardhan J. Pandit, Ph.D
> Assistant Professor
> ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University
> https://harshp.com/
>
>
>