Guide Comment with respect to the Unique Names issue (5.18)

I did a search for 5.18 in the subject line to see if there was a last
message on the unique names assumption issue.
I enclose the last message I found on the topic that does not make me
think we have resolution.
The reason i did this was that I was reviewing the guide wines ontology
and I would like to make a recommendation for a cleanliness pass over the
ontology.
My experience in the past from this kind of document is that the ontology
gets picked up and expanded upon in a number of tutorial settings.  If the
ontology author has not done a little bullet proofing in advance on the
ontology, students end up expanding it in all sorts of unexpected and
sometimes confusing ways.  Thus, I would like for the ontology not to only
be correct but to have a good foundation for extensibility.  Right now it
is open to some unintended consequences if it gets used by naive users.
One of those areas is impacted by the unique names assumption and
differentIndividual statements.

Given that we have a number of functional properties: hasSugar, hasFlavor,
hasBody, etc.
and given that a user could inadvertently state that for example, the
hasFlavor property for a wine is both strong and moderate, that would
result in the unintential incorrect (from a conceptual modeling
perspective) inference that Strong = Moderate.
We as the designers of the ontology can keep this inference from happening
without signaling a contradiction  by stating that strong is different
from moderate.

The ontology of course has a number of wine properties all of which have
sets of values.  Within each sets of values, we should have some way of
stating that:
full, medium, and light are different.
red, rose, and white are different.
strong, moderate, and delicate are different.
dry, offDry, and sweet are different, etc.

with our pairwise statements, this of course gets ugly fast.  Still I
think the pairwise statements should be added to the ontology from a
pedagogical perspective of what it takes to write an ontology that is
expected to be used.
I would prefer though to suggest that we use
allDifferent if we can agree to add that   or some other construct.

so this message has two points:
1 - it points out a place in our guide where we would greatly benefit from
some notion of allDifferent
2 - it strongly suggests that the guide ontology include some way of
stating difference between all of the individuals that fill functional
properties.  If that must be done in a pairwise method, then i would
include those statements but if we have included some kind of
allDifferent, we can use that in the ontology.

d

Dan Connolly wrote:

> On Thu, 2003-01-02 at 20:15, Christopher Welty wrote:
> > Dan,
> >
> > I think what Mike meant was explain the LEGAL syntax.  It will be no
> > problem to describe what it *does*, you tell us how to say it.
>
> I can't think of a nice looking syntax; that's why I'm
> lukewarm on AllDifferent. But you can
> see an example that has the right meaning in Jos's message...
>
> As I said...
> > It seems Jos already made the point in his message
> > of Sat, 21 Dec 2002 20:56:12 +0100
> >
> > | I just don't see how rdf:parsetype="Collection"
> > | could work in this case
>
> his message continues...
>
> =======
> excerpt from Jos's message
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2002Dec/0273.html
>
> I just don't see how rdf:parsetype="Collection"
> could work in this case, but anyhow, e.g.
>
>   <owl:AllDistinct rdf:nodeID='A0'>
>     <rdf:first rdf:resource='premises001#a'/>
>     <rdf:rest rdf:nodeID='A1'/>
>   </owl:AllDistinct>
>   <owl:AllDistinct rdf:nodeID='A1'>
>     <rdf:first rdf:resource='premises001#b'/>
>     <rdf:rest rdf:nodeID='A2'/>
>   </owl:AllDistinct>
>   <owl:AllDistinct rdf:nodeID='A2'>
>     <rdf:first rdf:resource='premises001#c'/>
>     <rdf:rest rdf:resource
> ='http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#nil'/>
>   </owl:AllDistinct>
>
> should entail
>
>     <rdf:Description rdf:about="premises001#a">
>         <owl:differentFrom rdf:resource="premises001#c"/>
>     </rdf:Description>
> =======
>
> --
> Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

--
 Deborah L. McGuinness
 Knowledge Systems Laboratory
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Received on Tuesday, 7 January 2003 18:16:51 UTC