Re: Ontology Mapping

At 11:10 AM -0400 8/9/02, Jeff Heflin wrote:
>Hi Hector,
>
>If you look at the OWL Requirements document [1], you'll see that one of
>the design goals is "3.3 Ontology Interoperability." Currently, there
>are plans for OWL to support the same kind of ontology mapping as is
>present in DAML+OIL, i.e. class and property equivalence, subclass,
>subproperty, and anything that can be expressed with class descriptions
>(e.g., boolean combinations, property restrictions, etc.).
>
>The requirements document also lists a number of "objectives," which are
>features that would be nice to have but may not be supported in the
>language. Among this list are "O11. String Manipulation" (which would
>allow the name mapping you describe), "O12. Aggregation and grouping,"
>and "O13. Procedural attachment." Most of the working group feels that
>these features would make the language too complex so it is unlike that
>they will make it into version 1.0.
>
>Jeff

Jeff is right.

Also, it had been my hope when I started the DAML program that we 
would get more into this -- the way I view it is that on the semantic 
web the ontologies are one kind of "documents" and these equivalences 
are the links between them (a reason I'm such an avid RDF fan, since 
RDF is analogous to the links where XML is a document language - but 
that's a long digression), anyway, at present I would claim that 
DAML+OIL and OWL give you a base on which you can create ontology 
mapping rules and etc., but that it does not provide very much in the 
ways of primitives for doing so, making for less interoperability of 
these mapping approaches - in the future I hope that rule languages 
and extensions to OWL will being to create "standard" ways of 
expressing mappings that could then be interoperable.  However, that 
is beyond the scope of the current OWL charter
  -Jim Hendler



-- 
Professor James Hendler				  hendler@cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-731-3822 (Cell)
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler

Received on Friday, 9 August 2002 11:49:13 UTC