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

[Rich Williams]

(I want to clarify that OWL is not necessarily stored in XML - the XML-RDF
syntax is just the most commonly chosen syntax.  You can store OWL (and RDF)
in much less-verbose, non-XML syntaxes.)

I agree that non-OWL-DL constructs should be avoided.  The extreme
flexibility of RDF and OWL-Full will make generic OWL-Full tools extremely
difficult to develop.  So far, the main thing that I have wanted to do that
is outside OWL-DL is to have a property that takes a class as its value,
rather than a class instance.  This restriction in expressivity leads to
some rather inelegant hacks to work around it and remain in OWL-DL.  Another
frequent issue is the lack of value restrictions on datatype properties, but
I don't think that this is available in OWL-Full either.  (One solution is
to subtype the xml datatypes to restrict the range of permissable values,
but no tools yet support this).

While I use Protege, I would not claim that it has anything approaching an
optimal user inteface, and I think that good visualization tools could play
a role for the so-called knowledge engineer (knowledge-model engineer?).
None of the graphical tools that I have experimented with have been better
for me than the Protege tree and dialog-box based user interface, so that's
what I use.

As far as the GrOWL UI goes, I see no reason why it can't be like the user
interface of many commercial software packages, where both entry-level and
expert users are accomodated.  There could be an easily-accessible set of
commonly performed operations (creating subclasses, disjoint, object and
datatype properties, some basic property restrictions etc), and the full
expressivity of OWL-DL could also be available through "advanced" or "more"
buttons in dialogs.

Rich


> -----Original Message-----
> From: seek-kr-sms-admin at ecoinformatics.org
> [mailto:seek-kr-sms-admin at ecoinformatics.org]On Behalf Of Shawn Bowers
> Sent: Thursday, June 10, 2004 10:18 AM
> To: Serguei Krivov
> Cc: seek-kr-sms at ecoinformatics.org
> Subject: Re: [seek-kr-sms] growl: owl-dl or owl full?!
>
>
> 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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