Some comments on DAML-S 0.9

I just read the Technical Overview and some Upper Ontology for Services (The version in OWL) from http://www.daml.org/services/daml-s/0.9/. Some of my comments are as follows:

1. The cardinality constraints within the Upper Ontology for services 

The last but one paragraph in section 3 "An Upper Ontology for Services" (in Technical Overview) says:
[The upper ontology for services specifies only two cardinality constraints: a service can be described by at most one service model, and a service model must be accompanied by at least one supporting grounding.]

The sentence "a service model must be accompanied by at least one supporting grounding" seems to be incorrect.

The "Service.owl.xml" says there are only two:
1) A service has 0 or 1 models
2) A Grounding must be associated with exactly one service.

In addition, the sentence "The upper ontology deliberately does not specify any minimum cardinality for the properties presents or describedBy" (in Technical Overview) should be updated as follows:

The upper ontology deliberately does not specify any minimum cardinality for the properties presents,describedBy or supports. (The "supports" property should be included)

2. The RefersTo property

"Profile.owl.xml" says:

The range of the RefersTo property is parameter (http://www.daml.org/services/owl-s/0.9/Process.owl#parameter).

It's well known that the range of a property should be a class. But, the object identified by process:parameter(within process ontology) is a property, not declared as a class. Thus it goes beyond the capability of OWL DL, and may lead to some difficulty/complexity for human understanding and machine processing.


3. The power sets

The class definitions of the ProcessPowerSet, AtomicProcessPowerSet and ParameterPowerSet in "Process.owl.xml"are problematic, because the meaning from the OWL perspective is not what is to be expected. 

Admittedly, I haven't yet seen any good solution to the set representation in OWL. If you have or hear any good solution, please let me know.

4. qualityRating VS QualityRating 

In section 4.2.6 Profile Attributes (in Technical Overview)
" QualityRating 
is used to specify the rating of a service using some rating system. The rating of a service provides the potential client with information about the quality of the service provided."

It should be "qualityRating"(a property), not "QualityRating" (a class).

And many other typo errors in the Upper Ontology for Services (The version in OWL). For example, the "then" in "In general there may be more then one contact information: " ( in "Profile.owl.xml"). 


I'm just involved in this mailing list. Maybe some of the above issues have been resolved. Any comment on this comment is welcome! 


Yuzhong Qu
Dept.Computer Science and Engineering
Southest University, Nanjing, China
http://cse.seu.edu.cn/People/yzqu/en

Received on Saturday, 13 September 2003 07:57:55 UTC