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

To: Ontology Summit 2015 discussion <ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Pascal Hitzler <pascal.hitzler@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2015 18:35:48 -0400
Message-id: <54FF71C4.2040806@xxxxxxxxxx>
+1    (01)

On 3/10/2015 5:14 PM, Pat Hayes wrote:
>
> On Mar 10, 2015, at 1:54 PM, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> AFAIK, nobody has claimed that it is The Ontology Language. It is "the" 
>W3C-recommended WEB Ontology Language, with an emphasis on the "Web" part.
>
> Pat
>
>>   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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>    (02)

-- 
Prof. Dr. Pascal Hitzler
Dept. of Computer Science, Wright State University, Dayton, OH
pascal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx   http://www.pascal-hitzler.de
Semantic Web Textbook: http://www.semantic-web-book.org
Semantic Web Journal: http://www.semantic-web-journal.net    (03)


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