Re: Proposed (parital) response to Ken Laskey and questions for WG

Jeff Heflin wrote as a proposed response to Ken Laskey:
>> <original section="2.2" paragraph="3">
>> An example of such knowledge would be that a "Late Georgian chest of
>> drawers" is typically made of mahogany. This knowledge is crucial for real
>> semantic queries, e.g. a user query for "antique mahogany storage
>> furniture" could match with images of Late Georgian chests of drawers, even
>> if nothing is said about wood type in the image annotation.
>> </original>
>> 
>> <comment>
>> OWL supports equivalence relationships but not probablistic relationships
>> such as "typically made of mahogany".  The concept "typically"would likely
>> be application-specific reasoning which might be supported by a value
>> mapping ontology, but this logic goes beyond OWL capabilities.  Suggest
>> adding to the end of the paragraph:
>>
>> While OWL in its present form does not intrinsically support such
>> probablistic or conditional associations useful in real semantic queries,
>> application-specific semantics could be encoded in OWL to support such
>> functionality.
>> </comment>
>
>Actually, the use case was talking about defeasible inheritance
>reasoning, not probability. Although probability can be clearly of use
>in some use cases, the working group did not consider it an important
>requirement, although support for probabilistic information is implied
>by Requirement R12. Attaching Information to Statements. Therefore, I
>decline the change.

I had similar troubles with this use case, but found your comment about
defeasible inheritance reasoning invaluable in tracking down how default
theory could be used in a language anything like OWL.  Perhaps it would be 
more responsive to his comment to identify this kind of reasoning right in 
a relevant part of requirements document (say in 02. Default property 
values).  Pointing out the default propery objective would be useful in any 
case since it discusses issues that led to OWL not supporting the feature.

-Evan

Received on Monday, 14 July 2003 17:43:06 UTC