Re: Replace outdated social models in OWL2 primer

On Mon, Mar 17, 2025 at 11:35 Chaals Nevile <chaals@fastmail.fm> wrote:

> Actually, since changing the examples would be a completely editorial
> change, although it is more than correcting a typo there is no real barrier
> to doing it, beyond the fact that it needs a little bit of work.
>
> To be honest, not everyone does like pizza, but it's a reasonable example
> to use because most people who are going to use OWL know enough about
> pizzas to find the examples relatable.
>
> While it is indeed important to work on new recommendations, it seems
> reasonable to update the old examples too, and it shouldn't be hard to find
> someone who considers doing that a reasonable use of their time and
> capabilities. I'll nominate myself as one such person...
>

A cheaper fix might be to add a line saying the status of the examples is
that they look a bit dated/hackneyed and point to somewhere (wiki, github
etc.) where more varied and diverse living collection of examples can be
found.

Dan

>
> cheers
>
>
> On Monday, 17 March 2025 10:38:15 (+01:00), Marco Neumann wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
>
> --
> Charles "Chaals" Nevile
> Using fastmail.fm because it's worth it
>