Re: plain rules, please [was: Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) 0.5 released]

On Wednesday, November 26, 2003, at 01:41 AM, Sandro Hawke wrote:
[snip]
> I can't speak for everyone on the committee, but I went along with
> this because (1) it's important that the rule language be usable in
> concert with OWL, and (2) several members of the JC were skeptical
> that a rule language can be specified orthogonal to OWL and then
> combined with it, while maintaining the proper semantics and desired
> reasoner performance characteristics.

There is a sense, I think, in which OWL rules is orthogonal to OW (I 
take it's combinability to be clear). There's no difficulty in using 
OWL Rules with "plain" RDF, i.e., atoms restricted to using primitive 
classes with no defined TBox or role hierarchy. It'd still be darned 
expressive (e.g., you wouldn't really be able to eliminate various TBox 
axioms and role hierarchy axioms since they are trivially expressible 
as OWL Rules).

The is probably not the orthogonality people wanted :)

>  I think the sense was that such
> orthogonality "might be nice" or even "would be nice", but until the
> details can be worked out, this 0.5 version seemed like a good
> waypoint.  A future language with orthogonality should be able to be
> compatible with this one, so letting folks begin coding to 0.5 seems
> reasonable.

Compatible in what sense? I mean, "well, the orthogonal language needed 
to be entirely disjoint with OWL, and heck, it's also disjoint with OWL 
rules!" or "Once we figure out how to be usefully orthogonal and yet 
combinable with OWL, we'll find that we've subsumed OWL rules or at 
least fit in nicely with them"?

Personally, I don't yet have even a vague sense of this :(

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.

Received on Wednesday, 26 November 2003 10:30:51 UTC