Re: Replace outdated social models in OWL2 primer

Indeed it would be cheaper. But realistically, not massively (given that we aren't talking about a massive amount of work given the overall value of OWL), and the value would equally be much lower...


(Although if someone has a good pointer to add which does include more living examples, that would be a Good Thing to note in any Edited Recommendation).

cheers


Chaals

On Monday, 17 March 2025 13:14:51 (+01:00), Dan Brickley wrote:




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