Adam, (01)
The problem with using this type of function in business is that specific
business agreements (either governing law or individual contract) can stipulate
the exact constant to be used in such conversions. This is one reason that B2B
standards like EDI have left fields for conversion rates, and also had well
formed rules for information availability, but have stopped short of actually
specifying such numbers. (02)
This doesn't alliviate the requriement for the ontology to understand the
functional aspects of such relationships, but does point out the requirement
that all information required by the function be visible outside of the
function, including any conversion factors. (03)
In the ontology, expressing the conversion factor, with a default value should
be sufficient to drive the business aspects. (04)
John (05)
-----Original Message-----
From: Adam Pease [mailto:adampease@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2003 8:20 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: [ontolog-forum] KIF vs. Protege - part deux (06)
Leo,
I read the following summary from Kurt on today's minutes - (07)
"The position that Leo and the other participants at last week's conference
call took was that Protege is an appropriate starting point because of
offers a number of practical advantages. " (08)
If you agree with this summary, what do you think are those practical
advantages, and how do you address the issue I stated in a message from
8/19 (copied below) (09)
--------------------------------
For example, let's say an order is for 2 Meters of 5cm by 5cm lumber,
and there's a US supplier for this product. We'd like to have axioms that
define these units, and support conversion. SUMO has the axiom (010)
(=>
(instance ?NUMBER RealNumber)
(equal
(MeasureFn ?NUMBER Inch)
(MeasureFn (MultiplicationFn ?NUMBER 0.02539999969303608) Meter))) (011)
Since Protege can't handle functions, you'd have to rewrite this axiom,
probably hard-coded as a procedural attachment, as opposed to expressed
declaratively. If it were just an issue of rewriting one axiom, it
wouldn't be a big deal, but there are hundreds of uses of MeasureFn in
SUMO, not to mention all the uses of other functions and expressions that
can't be represented in Protege. Your answer seems to be to include them
in comments, but the issue is not limited to comments. If we represent the
example in SUMO and KIF we have something like (012)
(orderItem LumberOrder27 OrderItem23)
(item OrderItem23 LumberObject4)
(length LumberObject4 (MeasureFn 2 Meter)) (013)
Now, if you try to represent this in Protege, you're stuck, because you
can't use the function. As you can see, this problem is not solved by
including the axiom in a comment, because the terms in those axioms need to
be used. To capture this same information in Protege, we'd wind up with
something like (014)
(orderItem LumberOrder27 OrderItem23)
(item OrderItem23 LumberObject4)
(length LumberObject4 "2 Meters") (015)
or slightly better: (016)
(orderItem LumberOrder27 OrderItem23)
(item OrderItem23 LumberObject4)
(length LumberObject4 Measure7)
(unit Measure7 Meter)
(value Measure7 2) (017)
Now the problem is that those terms are totally unconnected to SUMO
axioms. The new relations of "unit" and "value" are redundant with SUMO's
MeasureFn, and lack all the axioms which define MeasureFn. (018)
The result of this is a large amount of duplication of effort. You might
as well discard SUMO and start from scratch, which would of course mean a
lot of waste.
---------------------------------------- (019)
Adam (020)
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