Re: Replace outdated social models in OWL2 primer

Blessed be the fruit,
this has been an issue since the beginning of RDF modelling examples in the
late 1990s. These W3C documents can be seen as a record in time, and
updating them is not an option as they are constituent parts of the
existing W3C recommendation.

The best approach would be to create a new document that supersedes the
status quo of the respective recommendation.  eg new standards, I highly
recommend help working on new recommendations and their
supporting documentation like RDF 1.2 and SPARQL 1.2-

Best,
Marco



On Mon, Mar 17, 2025 at 8:25 AM Chris Mungall <cmungall@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Harshvardhan,
>
> Seems like a good idea, but I am not sure how easy it is to update W3C
> recommendations.
>
> This is perhaps a good time to mention that one of the most widely used
> ontologies for clinical and cancer research in the US used to have good
> modeling of gender concepts. However, in the latest release of the ontology
> from last week, OWL classes relating to gender have been deprecated or
> tagged, in compliance with US Executive Order 14168
> <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q132744740>, see
> https://genomic.social/@Cmungall/114152616246522594.
>
> While there are certainly more terrible things happening right now, this
> is a chilling demonstration of the far-reaching effects of the current
> administration's actions.
>
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2025 at 3:33 PM Harshvardhan J. Pandit <me@harshp..com>
> wrote:
>
>> 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/
>>
>>
>>

-- 


---
Marco Neumann