I'm no semweb expert, but understand most of the underlying concepts of it, but still feel the cost/benefit ratio of implementing and maintaining a semweb application is too high currently. My feeling is things need to be simplified, and be made more sloppy (the "be liberal in what you accept" adage).
Whats your opinion on this?
Thanks.
Yarden Katz
· 3 years ago
Some comments and a question: Why do you say we don't want an answer derived from network effect? It seems like an answer that aims for something intrinsic about OWL is bound to end up somewhere about OWL's expressive power (like your examples of it being suitable for configuration, bioinformatics, etc.) but I have two concerns about this: (i) expressive power doesn't answer what are good (let alone killer) applications are -- lots of stuff can be said in OWL, but what is it good for once it has been said? I don't think "representing and reasoning with partial information" is an application, and (ii) there are more expressive and still tractable (well, for values of 'tractable' that somebody who is willing to accept OWL as 'tractable' will endorse) logics than OWL - but people in semweb still seem to think that this does not hurt the value of OWL, so it seems to be something other than its expressive power that makes people endorse it. So about "representing and reasoning with partial information" - even if OWL is very good at that, it doesn't seem enough to distinguish it from other formalisms.
About network effect -- would you reject the following:
(NE) "OWL was designed to be expressive, which is a plus. Its real advantage comes from reuse of concepts on the scale of the web and linking. [insert other usual network effect-y things]. "
I think the above will fail -- i.e. network effect will not lead to these happy things -- but I think that distinguishing OWL by picking on the fact that it's a "web logic" (and hence bound for network effects) is more accurate than trying to distinguish OWL by some of its logical features (expressivity, syntax [Oh god, not syntax!], etc.) which are not in any sense very new or very interesting, imo.
Bijan Parsia
· 3 years ago
In relpy to Yarden: I say I don't want an answer derived from the network effect because we don't (largely) have a suitable network effect, and it's not clear that without first order benefits that we're right to encourage adoption based on second order benefits. At least, it's ungrounded, especially in the presence of other things that already have the second order benefits, nigh overwhelmingly.
(Of course, there are relative arguments. If someone wanted to work with SHIF ontologies, I would not recommend that they use KRSS syntax instead of OWL RDF/XML syntax...the latter has advantages solely from it being a standard even though, in many ways it's a technical PITA.)
I don't think I said that "representing and reasoning with partial information" is the application, just that (for certain ranges) that's what OWL does well, so any app (e.g., configuration) which requires that is a good candidate for OWL.
People regularly ask for more expressive power (e.g., OWL 1.1)...so I don't see your point. Obviously, if you can't represent something in OWL due to some other limitation (e.g., you need role value maps) then OWL doesn't help you, but I don't think I suggested otehrwise.
Also, I'm not trying to distinguish OWL from other similar logics, but OWL from e.g., "webized Datalog" or XML. Where does the particularly expressivity help? What is it good for, in general? Of course, I appeal to traditional DL applications, because those are known. We can see how something like OWL would help with them.
I'm not trying to speculate...I'm trying to help people acquire a concrete understanding of what you could sensibly use OWL for.
All Comments
I posted the following message to the Semantic Mediawiki list, about something I called "Triple+": http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?...
I've seen a RDF proposal called "Quads" (http://robustai.net/sailor/grammar/Quads.html), but that still seems too structured for common use.
I'm no semweb expert, but understand most of the underlying concepts of it, but still feel the cost/benefit ratio of implementing and maintaining a semweb application is too high currently. My feeling is things need to be simplified, and be made more sloppy (the "be liberal in what you accept" adage).
Whats your opinion on this?
Thanks.
About network effect -- would you reject the following:
(NE) "OWL was designed to be expressive, which is a plus. Its real advantage comes from reuse of concepts on the scale of the web and linking. [insert other usual network effect-y things]. "
I think the above will fail -- i.e. network effect will not lead to these happy things -- but I think that distinguishing OWL by picking on the fact that it's a "web logic" (and hence bound for network effects) is more accurate than trying to distinguish OWL by some of its logical features (expressivity, syntax [Oh god, not syntax!], etc.) which are not in any sense very new or very interesting, imo.
(Of course, there are relative arguments. If someone wanted to work with SHIF ontologies, I would not recommend that they use KRSS syntax instead of OWL RDF/XML syntax...the latter has advantages solely from it being a standard even though, in many ways it's a technical PITA.)
I don't think I said that "representing and reasoning with partial information" is the application, just that (for certain ranges) that's what OWL does well, so any app (e.g., configuration) which requires that is a good candidate for OWL.
People regularly ask for more expressive power (e.g., OWL 1.1)...so I don't see your point. Obviously, if you can't represent something in OWL due to some other limitation (e.g., you need role value maps) then OWL doesn't help you, but I don't think I suggested otehrwise.
Also, I'm not trying to distinguish OWL from other similar logics, but OWL from e.g., "webized Datalog" or XML. Where does the particularly expressivity help? What is it good for, in general? Of course, I appeal to traditional DL applications, because those are known. We can see how something like OWL would help with them.
I'm not trying to speculate...I'm trying to help people acquire a concrete understanding of what you could sensibly use OWL for.