Re: Possible semantic bugs concerning domain and range

THanks for pointing out my error, Jim.    I misunderstood "desireable" in 
the requirements document (regarding decidability) to mean that it was 
something that should be acheived.  I did not think I was expressing my 
opinion in the message below, I thought I was expressing the group's 
consensus, but that is not correct.  Also, then, a more accurate rendering 
of my statement regarding DL's and OWL is that "OWL is *loosely* based on 
a description logic".

OK, then, I guess I can't just dismiss Pat's ideas after all.  I'll try a 
different approach ;)

-Chris


Dr. Christopher A. Welty, Knowledge Structures Group
IBM Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Dr.
Hawthorne, NY  10532     USA 
Voice: +1 914.784.7055,  IBM T/L: 863.7055
Fax: +1 914.784.6078, Email: welty@us.ibm.com




Jim Hendler <hendler@cs.umd.edu>
Sent by: www-webont-wg-request@w3.org
09/30/2002 07:30 AM

 
        To:     Christopher Welty/Watson/IBM@IBMUS, pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
        cc:     Ian Horrocks <horrocks@cs.man.ac.uk>, www-webont-wg@w3.org, 
www-webont-wg-request@w3.org
        Subject:        Re: Possible semantic bugs concerning domain and range

 


At 9:04 PM -0400 9/29/02, Christopher Welty wrote:
>Pat,
>
>OK, I (at least) get it.  So if this is the semantics of ranges in rdfs
>(is it?), then probably we should not use rdfs ranges for OWL.  OWL is
>supposed to be based on description logics, which are a decidable 
fragment
>of FOL (not the only one, btw).

Forgive me Chris, but I have no idea where you get the idea that OWL 
is "supposed to be based on description logics" -- that is not what 
our charter says, that is no where in our requirements statement. 
Some members of the group believe this desirable because of the 
performance factors of DLs.  This has not been recorded as group 
consensus to my knowledge.

>   You can say all you want about the
>expressive limitations of DLs, and you can point out an infinite number 
of
>things they can't do.  I've thrown them away a bunch of times when I
>absolutely needed more. But if you can say what you want to say within
>their expressive limits, they you can be assured you're going to get
>answers.  Take one step over that line and ba-da-bing! - you're gone.
>
>As an ontology designer, I would absolutely love to be unfettered in my
>expressive ability.  In fact, I usually go ahead and use nth order logic
>with modal quantifiers and all manner of cool stuff.  I love variadic
>predicates, too.    But as a system builder, I also want to know what the
>most is I can say and still be guaranteed a result.
>
>So, anyway, seems to me this group is already committed to producing a
>standard based on a language that is sound, complete, and decidable.

Chris - again, please read our documents before you say these things 
- we committed only to what is stated in our reqs documents [1]. 
Decidability was an "objective" - meaning we were not sure if we 
could achieve it.  So far we have not met all our requirements - 
until we do, it is wrong to focus on objectives or to focus on one 
objective to the exclusion of all the others.

>   So we will have to lose the wild-west syntax and stick with what the 
DL
>guys
>know how to implement.  All the entailments apparently help speed things
>up.


Stating this as your own position is just fine.  Stating it as group 
consensus is incorrect



[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/webont-req/
-- 
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)
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Received on Monday, 30 September 2002 10:09:05 UTC