[ontolog-forum] OWL Well Defined Semantics (was: Terminology...)

[Adrian Walker <adriandwalker@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi John, Chris, and Pat,

The following kind of got lost under a wrong subject heading on Ontolog, and I'm wondering whether you have time to comment please.

Ed Barkmeyer wrote:

At least with OWL the models have well-defined formal semantics,...

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression that OWL shares with full first order logic the property of having in general more than one model for a given set of clauses.

If so, there's ambiguity about what it should be possible to deduce, and the formal semantics is therefore (in a practical sense) not well-defined.

Hope I'm wrong about this.  John,  Christoph, Others care to comment?  (Perhaps under a new subject heading.)

                          Thanks,       -- Adrian

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Adrian Walker
Reengineering

On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 12:53 PM, Ed Barkmeyer <edbark@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

John F. Sowa wrote:
> Ed,
>
> I completely agree with everything you said about terminology. I
> realize the value of good terminologies, and I wasn't criticizing
> any of that work.
>
> EB
>
>> Remember first that the audience for that work is people who write
>> domain vocabularies, standards of practice and other semi-formal
>> publications.  The objective is to explain to such persons how to select
>> terms, and conceive and write definitions that will be clear and
>> understandable to other people who have some training in the subject domain.
>>
>
> The point I wanted to make is that the overwhelming majority of
> the so-called OWL ontologies on the web are *terminologies*.
> Their definitions are stated as OWL comments, and they don't
> use any of the reasoning methods designed for OWL.
>

And my point is that these OWL ontologies are created by people who are
just learning to formalize concepts.  This is Mozart Symphony #1 at an
age between 20 and 40.  Yes, they are little more than terminologies.
Be thankful that these folk are using OWL, instead of XML Schema or UML
or ISO 11179 or SBVR.  At least with OWL the models have well-defined
formal semantics, wherein, for example, A subsumes B doesn't mean Bs can
be thought of as As, or Bs are analogous to As, or most Bs are As, or Bs
are As except that xxx.  And with OWL, these models have the possibility
of extended axiomatization, as these people, or their peers and
successors, get further up the learning curve.  An OWL terminology glass
is half full.

-Ed

> John
>
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--
Edward J. Barkmeyer                        Email: edbark@xxxxxxxx
National Institute of Standards & Technology
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