[seek-kr-sms] OWL Inference APIs (was Re: SMS stuff)

[Shawn Bowers]

Bertram Ludaescher wrote:

> Serguei:
> 
> Good points! I agree that it would be useful to understand what
> features are needed most in SEEK -- I guess the answer is "it
> depends".
> 
> I would hope that for many things (e.g., the core SMS, semantic typing 
> etc) we can get away with "standard" reasoning approaches, w/o getting 
> all the way to the very fancy features that are at the bleeding CS
> edge. While those are very exciting, I fear they will make us sweat a
> lot. Even reasoners for "standard" DLs have problems it seems...
> 
> but maybe we should just bite the bullet and run with those fancy
> examples you have.

I generally agree here: it would be really useful to know what exact 
expressibility is needed in a DL for SEEK (or for ecological ontologies) 
... but I think that at this point it isn't clear.  It might be nice to 
start a short-list of the "extra" or "non-standard" features we come 
across (with examples of why we think they are needed) as well as the 
OWL-DL features we definately won't need.  At some point we may converge 
on a nice DL for defining ecological ontologies (which would probably be 
worth a publication somewhere).

Actually, here is an interesting paper (that I haven't read yet) that 
introduces S-Box reasoning for spatial relationships:

http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~haarslev/publications/qr-97web.pdf

It looks like they extend the notions of concrete domains for their work.


Shawn



> 
> Do you have plans to use existing or tweak, extend existing reasoners?
> (we have some plans here on that too ...)
> 
> Bertram
> 
> 
>>>>>>"SK" == Serguei Krivov <Serguei.Krivov at uvm.edu> writes:
> 
> SK> 
> SK> Shawn,
> SK> Thanks for the interesting survey. I also have been looking at DL
> SK> reasoning with focus on tableaux algorithms and found a few points worth
> SK> of attention. Apparently there are a few semantic features which are not
> SK> part of present owl, but they are extremely useful and they are
> SK> available in some decidable systems.
> SK> 1. Role boxes: In owl one can not say that role Uncle is subrole of
> SK> composition of roles Parent*Brother. Role boxes were avoided for a long
> SK> time since in general they lead to undecidable systems. But apparently
> SK> some limited (acyclic) role boxes can be added to SHIQ without loose of
> SK> decidability:
> SK> http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~horrocks/Publications/download/2003/HoSa03a.pdf
> SK> 
> SK> 2. Feature(functional role) agreement. In owl one can not say something
> SK> like
> SK> "for every chemical flow its agent should be the same as agent of
> SK> respective stocks it connect"-
> SK> flow.agent=flow.source.agent=flow.target.agent. But in very old system
> SK> ALCF it is possible. Apparently addition of  agreement/disagreement for
> SK> functional roles does not lead to undesirability in many even more
> SK> complex cases.
> SK> 
> SK> 3. Reasoning with concrete domain vs time and space. Reasoning about
> SK> space and time may not be important for general users of ontologies so
> SK> it is not in owl. But it is important for ecologists and perhaps
> SK> eventually we shall bump in it. Although Racer supports reasoning with
> SK> concrete domains such as integers and friends, it does not come to
> SK> space/time. Yet potentially we can use DL reasoner for checking
> SK> consistency of statements about space, time , and even space-time as
> SK> long as they are represented properly (as admissible domain). I am
> SK> attaching paper that surveys this topic in detail. Specifically
> SK> interesting points about space and time are in the end and of course
> SK> there are many references on this subject worth of reading. 
> SK> 
> SK> Certainly it is not possible to combine all semantic features we need in
> SK> one decidable DL system.   But I think it would be good to understand
> SK> what features are the most important in context of SEEK. Then we can try
> SK> to design a tableaux that accommodates most of the essential features we
> SK> need.  
> SK> 
> SK> Serguei  
> 
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