On Dec 15, 2010, at 12:34 PM, Michael F Uschold wrote:
Ian,
Your points are technically accurate, but miss the social aspect, which is profoundly significant. Socially, OWL is being pushed as a standard for representing ontologies. Hence more and more companies are feeling that they should use OWL because there is a perception of more tools, greater support, less vendor-lockin and a larger community.
Kluwer created OWL ontologies for the legal content that is their core business. They got all tied in knots with the open world assumption. I could not help but think that they might have been better off using an FLogic-based approach that is supported by say Ontoprise or HighFleet (formerly Ontology Works).
The answer is not to harp on OWL, as you say, but to recognize that there are needs for broader support for other approaches. High FLeet supports Common Logic, and it is a standard - but noone cares about it because noone is using or supporting it.
This betrays in important misunderstanding that sort of gets things the wrong way around. Better to say: Common Logic supports most every logic-based framework, in the sense that such frameworks are all Common Logic dialects. All that is needed in order for a framework to "support" Common Logic is an explicit characterization of it as such a dialect. It is a mistake to think of Common Logic as some sort of competitor to OWL, RDF, etc. One of the central goals of Common Logic's design was to serve as an overarching abstract logical framework in which the underlying commonalities and differences between concrete frameworks could be easily identified.
Chris Menzel