Guide: treatment of deprecation

I'm still here in Manchester and have talked to Peter about the 
"full-ness" of the two proposed deprecation classes, deprecatedClass and 
deprecatedProperty.  To avoid having this put an ontology in OWL Full, 
Peter considered adding them as special tags to the syntax, and also 
bundling these in as annotations.

I considered my own needs for versioning and also spoke extensively with 
Alan Rector who absolutely requires versioning for his medical ontologies 
(it's required by law, as I understood it, so this is a stronger 
"requires" than we've considered).  Alan needs far more than what we have 
proposed, but also needs to be in Lite or DL.  He is willing to define his 
own OWL Full ontology for his versioning needs and then separate the 
versioning axioms into another ontology that will not be reasoned over. 
This is, honestly, the first time I've carefully considered the versioning 
issue, and I find that augmenting the syntax or bundling versioning into 
annotations may require people like Alan to completely bypass the OWL 
versioning stuff and build something else.  However, keeping 
deprecatedClass and deprecatedProperty as the "seeds" of a versioning 
ontology would allow him to simply augment this part of the standard.

I consider this to be a better solution.  The net of it is that we stick 
with Jeff's proposed solution, including the (possibly unexpected) 
consequence that any ontology that uses deprecatedClass and 
deprecatedProperty are in OWL Full.  In Guide, I will simply note that 
while this is the case (using deprecation puts you in Full), users who 
wish to remain in Lite or DL can separate their versioning information 
into another ontology that imports the one being versioned.

Peter doesn't care, and is happy that it requires no change to AS&S.  Alan 
is still considering it, and seems to be in favor of it.  I am in favor as 
well.  I realize this has already been resolved to be the solution, but 
again I'm not sure those in favor of it realized deprecation causes 
fullness.

Any comments?

Finally, as I've pointed out previously, several of these extra-logical 
features that are not in the AS&S need (don't they???) normative 
references.  Where should they go?

-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

Received on Monday, 13 January 2003 11:17:14 UTC