Re: [Fwd: RE: LANG: compliance levels]

Ziv Hellman wrote:

> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: Deborah McGuinness [mailto:dlm@ksl.stanford.edu]
> >Sent: Sunday, 28 April, 2002 2:37
> >To: www-webont-wg@w3.org
> >Subject: Re: [Fwd: RE: LANG: compliance levels]

... portion removed

> >> 2) As recent email exchanges on the WebOnt forum indicate, the
> >> distinction between primitive and defined classes can be tenuous, at
> >> least with full DAML+OIL expressiveness. Will the same be true of
> >> compliance level 1 of OWL?
> >
> >I guess I need more detail on the tenuous nature of
> >defined/primitive distinction in order to address this question.
> >I think we do not have a choice in daml+oil/owl/fowl but to
> >solve the issue of grouping statements somehow and thus will
> >have a mechanism for grouping an entire term definition
> >together thus solving the problem of potentially having
> >sufficiency conditions for membership in multiple places in a
> >knowledge base.  If this problem is solved, do you still have
> >other problems with the primitive/defined class
> >distinction?
>
> As I understood matters, the problem with primitive vs defined classes
> does indeed revolve around whether a class has associated with it
> sufficiency conditions for inferring instance membership. If statement
> grouping were strictly enforced to prevent the possibility of
> sufficiency conditions ever appearing other than in the location in
> which the original class definition is made, then this problem could be
> overcome, but the price might be too high. In Web and distributed pages
> contexts, the flexibility to refer in one document to a class defined in
> another document somewhere else, and perhaps add new
> conditions/definitions would seem to be of high importance. Strict local
> grouping of definitions would run counter to this Web ambition.
>
> >

I agree that in web settings it is imperative to be able to refer in one
document to a class defined in another document.  Although I think the
option of modifying the definition of a defined class is quite dangerous -
then all of the inferences that one could count on from the other ontology
are potentially modified and potentially now could cause contradictions.
I think this feature is giving users too much rope that allows them too
easily to create problems for themselves.  I would suggest the social
convention that additions to a defined term from another ontology be done by
creating a new class that is a subclass of the previously defined term with
whatever new conditions are important.

Even if I would get outvoted in our webont group though and we as a group
thought it was imperative to allow monotonic additions to defined terms, the
new document could require that all additions be grouped together in one
place in the new document.

Deborah
--
 Deborah L. McGuinness
 Knowledge Systems Laboratory
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 Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-9020
 email: dlm@ksl.stanford.edu
 URL: http://ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm
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705 0941

Received on Sunday, 28 April 2002 14:06:12 UTC