How to capture modeling information in WOL

"The differences in RDF and WOL entailment is a brilliant feature"

I recall many discussions on how to deal with modeling information in
a logical framework. Lets take a simple example. A statement like

	(1) a & b

should be treaded completely equal to a statement

	(2) b & a

at a logical level. However, at a modeling level you may want to know
whether a person wrote (1) or (2) because it may reflect the fact that
b is more "important" to him. A more real-life example is whether a
person define

	- a relation "r" as an attribute of a class "c" or
	- as a global property "r" with "c" as its domain.

Logically they are the same but from a modeling point of view
they are quite different.

By having two types of entailments we can capture this without
running into any problems. With syntactical RDF reasoning we
can ask for different syntactical styles of an Ontology and with
semantic WOL reasoning we infer logical consequences of an
Ontology. This view point would also allow us to deal with
different modeling paradigms people are asking for. Many
emails and papers were asking for the frame-based syntax of
OIL that disappeared in DAML+OIL (i.e., OIL was a web-based
modeling language whereas DAML+OIL is "just" a web-based
logic). We could just define a frame syntax for WOL in RDF
making sure that it behaves the same as the non-frame version
at the logical level but behaves different at the syntactical level,
i.e., in the frame version you could ask whether something is
explicitly defined as an attribute or as a property.

In a nutshell, I think it is a brilliant feature having a reasoning
level that reasons "non"-logically but syntactically over an WOL
Ontology. It is the layer that allows us to capture, infer, and
query modeling information. Therefore, this type of information
no longer needs to be messed up with the logical layer,
where indeed you do not want to care about the different syntax of
logically equivalent statements.

So I would strongly vote for encoding WOL as closely as possible
in RDF and taking the differences in entailment as a beautiful gift.


Dieter

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Dieter Fensel
Division of Mathematics & Computer Science,
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam,
De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam, NL
The Netherlands
Tel. (mobil): +31-(0)6-51850619,
Fax and Answering machine: +31-(0)84-872 27 22
Email: dieter@cs.vu.nl
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Privat: Liendenhof 64, NL-1108 HB Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Tel.: +31-(0)20-365 52 60.
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Received on Thursday, 27 December 2001 09:45:41 UTC