Re: OWL Lite semantics (fwd)

On December 9, Jim Hendler writes:
> >
> >Finally, I think that it is rather ridiculous to appeal to the feature
> >synopsis as though it where a requirements analysis for entailment. I
> >know of many applications where OWL Lite would be adequate in terms of
> >expressive power, but where entailments relying on iff semantics for
> >owl:sameClassAs are essential.
> >
> >Regards, Ian
> 
> Great, can you give us real world examples?  These would be useful 
> for our implementation reports.

Sure, here are a couple.

One of our students worked on a web services discovery application at
HP Labs in Bristol (so this should be close to Jeremy's heart).  The
basic idea is that an advertising agent sends a (DAML+OIL/OWL)
description of the service to a repository, where it is added to an
advertisements ontology (i.e., an axiom such as "advertisement-nnn
sameClassAs description" is added to the ontology), querying agents
send descriptions of a required service, and the repository returns all
those advertisements that "match" the description (various kinds of
match are possible, but the simplest is just semantic
equivalence). This would not work with the proposed semantics because
descriptions could never be recognised as being the same as
advertisements in the advertisement ontology.

We have also done a lot of work recently on a publish and subscribe
system using DAML+OIL/OWL. This is similar to the above service
discovery application in that subscribers describe the kinds of
"publication" (e.g., messages) they are interested in, and messages
are routed to subscribers according to their descriptions.

I could, of course, give you lots of examples in ontology design,
maintenance and integration, but the above two serve to show that iff
semantics are also crucial in many applications.

Regards, Ian


> 
> 
> -- 
> 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 Tuesday, 10 December 2002 03:37:34 UTC