[seek-kr-sms] growl: owl-dl or owl full?!

Shawn Bowers bowers at sdsc.edu
Thu Jun 10 10:17:39 PDT 2004


Hi Serguei,

If you look at the Protege data model, they have a language that offers 
similar meta-modeling constructs as found in OWL-Full.

In my opinion, the use of these constructs, unless you really know what 
you are doing, can be confusing and often leads to incomprehensible 
conceptual models.

My general opinion is to not support similar constructs in GrOWL.

But, it isn't clear to me at this point who the target user is of the 
GrOWL onto editing and management tools.  If it is scientists and other 
domain experts, I think most of the OWL-DL and even OWL-Lite constructs 
will be too much. For these users, I think we need to be very clear 
about what modeling constructs we want to support (e.g., these 
constructs may be at a "higher" level than OWL-DL constructs), 
explicitly support the needed constructs through visual notations (not 
OWL formulas); then figure out how those constructs are realized by 
OWL-Lite or OWL-DL.  Since GrOWL seems to be on track to output OWL 
ontologies, these can be further edited by a knowledge "engineer" if 
needed (to add more constraints). However, if the target user group is 
knowledge engineers, e.g., Rich and the KR group, doesn't Protege 
already offer the necessary interface?

In general, the family of OWL standards are complex, with many modeling 
constructs, and verbose, not only because OWL is stored via XML, but 
also because it is based on RDF.  I think there is a definate need for 
ontology tools that do more than just expose OWL or any other DL -- like 
XML, OWL is much better suited as a storage and exchange language, not 
as an interface in and of itself for users.

So, my overall suggestion, would be to figure out the necessary 
constructs for the target user group (which I'd be happy to help with), 
figure out how best to present these to the user (again, I'd be happy to 
help with this), then figure out if it is representable in OWL-Lite, 
OWL-DL (most likely), or OWL-Full (not likely).


shawn

Serguei Krivov wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I am working on growl editing and have an urgent design issue:
> 
> Should we impose the editing discipline which would allow owl dl 
> constructs only and    do nothing when user tries to make an owl full 
> construct? Some editors like oil-edit (that works with owl now) are 
> intolerant to owl full. Personally I think that this is right since 
> owl-full ontologies are difficult to use. OWLAPI seems also not really 
> happy to see owl-full constructs, it reports error, however somehow it 
> processes them.
> 
>  
> 
> Ideally one can have a trigger which switch owl-dl discipline on and 
> off. But implementing such trigger would increase the editing code may 
> be 1.6 times comparing to making plain owl-dl discipline. I would leave 
> this for the future, but you guys may have other suggestions (?)
> 
> Please let me know what you think.
> 
> serguei
> 
>  
> 




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