Ian, (01)
I apologize for using the word 'hate': (02)
> I'm even more surprised that someone who apparently likes FOL
> "hates" these particular fragments. (03)
I have never "hated" description logics. And as you know, the ICCS
conferences include a number of DL aficionados who have invited you,
Franz Baader, Boris Motik, and other leaders in the DL community. (04)
And I have the highest regard for research on computational complexity,
decidability, and related issues -- including ways of addressing those
issues in practical computation. (05)
> In fact, you could think of OWL as being a design pattern, which
> you apparently like, as opposed to a fragment, which you don't like. (06)
I have always thought of DLs as a design pattern, but that is not
the message that comes across in any of the OWL documentation.
Instead, many people who know nothing about decidability parrot
the words "Oh, you can't use FOL because it's undecidable." (07)
I'm not blaming you for that misunderstanding, but that's how many
people interpret all the hype and confusion that surrounds the
Semantic Web. That view is reinforced by the layer cake, in which
the only reasoning tool available is OWL. There is a box labeled
RIF, but that box is not yet supported by any usable tools. (08)
The impression that OWL is the Only Web Logic is further enhanced
by the directions that OWL 2 has taken to include a rule language
and to spawn a variety of subsets, such as SKOS. There is nothing
wrong with those subsets, but they reinforce the impression that
OWL is necessary and sufficient for reasoning on the Web. (09)
> Coming back to the OWL -v- FOL question, I think that much of
> the "problem" arises from fundamental differences in how we view
> the design and use of ontologies. (010)
We both understand the issues very, very well. My position is
summarized in the title of a recent paper: "Two paradigms are
better than one, and multiple paradigms are even better." (011)
Among those paradigms are induction, deduction, and abduction
with many different subsets and supersets of FOL and methods
of learning, analogy, statistics, data mining, etc., etc., etc. (012)
I also mentioned UML because it comes closer to being a multi-
paradigm collection of diagrams plus FOL represented as a mosaic,
rather than a layer cake. I would be very happy to see OWL and
many other AI tools presented as components in such a mosaic. (013)
But the "decision makers", who never see anything more detailed
than slides with pretty pictures, don't have a clue about them.
And in public lectures, the OWL proponents omit or gloss over
the qualifications, even for students who are willing and able
to learn the details. Your research publications address the
details, but the decision makers dispense funding on the basis
of pretty pictures, and the students go where the funding goes. (014)
> Hopefully you can try to see OWL in a similar light -- it is
> raising the profile of ontologies, encouraging the use of
> (a fragment of) FOL as an ontology language, and providing you
> with a ready source of "customers" ripe for "upgrading". (015)
I agree that OWL is raising the profile of ontologies. And I was
one of the "early adopters" of the word 'ontology' in my 1983 book.
But that word has been misused in so many confusing and misleading
ways that I almost regret I ever used it. (016)
In any case, I do have a high regard for the research that you and
your colleagues have been doing. But my major quarrel is with the
way OWL has been advertised and sold to people who don't understand
the much wider range of issues. (017)
John (018)
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