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Re: [ontolog-forum] [ontology-summit] Proposed RDF FHIR syntax feedback

To: "'[ontolog-forum] '" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, <ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "Rich Cooper" <Rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2015 12:33:09 -0700
Message-id: <052601d05b69$0a4ff3d0$1eefdb70$@com>

On 3/10/2015 1:31 PM, Simon Spero wrote:

> There are also named individuals that can appear in the T-Box - SH_O_IN(D).

 

JFS> There are some privileged individuals, such as the earth and the sun,

which are essential for defining geographical coordinates, times, days,

nights, etc.  For any country X, it's impossible to specify the laws

of X without referring to X and some named entities in X.  And for any

business Y, the business types and rules used for Y will normally make

many references to Y and some named entities in Y.

 

John,

 

By “Individuals”, you mean objects restricted to instances of a TBox type, and by “privileged”, you mean that there are constant instances used to initialize the “privileged individuals” in my interpretation of that statement.  Perhaps certain of the functions and methods also check to see if privileges are available for each instance by its property values before doing their respective functional and methodical things. 

 

So if I have followed that correctly, that means you can use classes instead of Sets for the TBox types.  There is no TBox that has its own type as an instance, but every instance of a TBox has a copy of the TBox’s initial value instances. 

 

Is that correct?  There is no need to have TBoxes that contain themselves as instances?  Therefore a class is an adequate implementation of the TBox concept?

 

-Rich

 

Sincerely,

Rich Cooper,

Rich Cooper,

www DOT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

( 9 4 9 ) 5 2 5-5 7 1 2

 

-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F Sowa
Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2015 11:55 AM
To: ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] [ontology-summit] Proposed RDF FHIR syntax feedback

 

On 3/10/2015 1:31 PM, Simon Spero wrote:

> There are also named individuals that can appear in the T-Box - SH_O_IN(D).

 

There are some privileged individuals, such as the earth and the sun,

which are essential for defining geographical coordinates, times, days,

nights, etc.  For any country X, it's impossible to specify the laws

of X without referring to X and some named entities in X.  And for any

business Y, the business types and rules used for Y will normally make

many references to Y and some named entities in Y.

 

> There can also be anonymous individuals as annotation values. (This

> triggered a horrible bug in the OWLAPI when used  with punning.)

 

Yes.  And my major complaint about OWL is that it should be called

*An* Ontology Language, not *The* Ontology Language.  Some things we

know about the currently popular languages:  (a) they have changed

considerably over the past 10 years, (b) they will change even more

over the next 10 years, and (c) there are and will be many more

languages that will have to interoperate with them.

 

For some perspective on the history of interoperable systems and

proposed standards for them, see http://www.jfsowa.com/ikl

 

General principle:  Flexible guidelines for ontology design are

useful.  But rigid standards will be obsolete as soon as they're

written.  I agree with the comments below by Pat Hayes.

 

John

 

-----Original Message-----

From: Pat Hayes [mailto:phayes@xxxxxxx]

Sent: Sunday, March 08, 2015 2:31 PM

To: Anthony Mallia

Cc: David Booth; public-semweb-lifesci@xxxxxx; HL7 ITS

Subject: Re: Proposed RDF FHIR syntax feedback

 

Comments in-line:

 

On Mar 8, 2015, at 9:00 AM, Anthony Mallia <amallia@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

 

 > David,

 

 > I believe that this is an important aspect to distinguish between the

type or TBox and the instance or ABox. A simple justification is that

they come from different authorities (and end points) - HL7 or an EHR

system.

 

If there is any other reason to distinguish them, please list as many of

them as you can. If this is the only reason, I would strongly suggest

that it is not a sufficient reason for introducing this rigid

distinction into the foundation. It would be better to provide a

mechanism to allow the kind of originating authority to be specified

explicitly. The question to ask is, what utility in actual processing

will arise from having this distinction rigidly enforced? The problems

it (artificially) introduces is that it makes most OWL2 ontologies

unclassifiable, since many of them contain both class and instance data:

in fact, OWL2 punning makes this very distinction rather hard to detect,

since a class in OWL 2 may itself be an instance; and it forces users to

make a needless classification decision which may give rise to errors

and difficulties in processing.

 

 > However I would strongly recommend that we DO NOT REDEFINE Ontology

from its definition in the W3C specs - this will cause major confusion.

 

 > Here is the extract from OWL2:

 > "OWL 2 ontologies provide classes, properties, individuals, and data

values and are stored as Semantic Web documents. OWL 2 ontologies can be

used along with information written in RDF, and OWL 2 ontologies

themselves are primarily exchanged as RDF documents."

 

That defines an OWL2 ontology. If you are planning to use other

representation languages, I would suggest adopting a wider definition of

the bare concept of 'ontology'. By the way, this topic - how to define

'ontology' - was discussed in depth for a year in the Ontolog forum. I

recommend reading

http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2007_Communique

and the surrounding discussions before coming to a decision.

 

 > So I am recommending two subtypes of Ontology :

 > INSTANCE ONTOLOGY (INSTANCE for short) contains Individuals, their

Property assertions and their data values but may refer to contents of

MODEL(s)

 

I think you mean it contains individual *names*, right?

 

When you say 'may refer to', what distinction are you making between

'refer to' and 'contain'? Do you mean it will not contain the

*definitions* of the classes, etc.? But there is no concept of

'definition' in the RDF/OWL world.

 

 > MODEL ONTOLOGY (MODEL for short) contains Classes, ObjectProperties,

DataProperties and Datatypes

 

And what will you do with something which contains large amounts of

instance data, described using a mixture of vocabulary from a number of

other ontologies and a small number of class and property definitions

local to it? Because this is, if anything, the normal situation in

Web-based ontology work.

 

 > INSTANCE and MODEL are disjoint

 

Which, if enforced, is going to create errors and blocks to processing

for no functional reason. Why do this? It is a bad design decision to

introduce distinctions that have no utility other than to be enforced

and generate error messages. If this is a genuine type distinction, then

you should be able to say what reasons there are for a processor to know

what type an ontology is. How will an INSTANCE be processed differently

from a MODEL?

 

 > but there can be Ontologies (neither of these subtypes) which combine

them through merge or import and would be used for reasoning.

 > It should not be necessary to separate these two by MIME type - they

will be handled quite differently e.g. import statements will know

exactly what they are trying to do.

 

importing is completely transparent to this distinction. Both of them

(and any hybrids) will be imported in the same way using the same

mechanisms. This is part of the RDF/OWL design.

 

Pat Hayes

 

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