[Person-ontology] Ontology Requirements for Distributed Data Sharing

[Pat Hayes]

>Pat Hayes wrote:
>
><snip>
>>  While I agree that "cross-context data sharing" is important, I don't
>>  believe that the Higgins project's approach to it is either necessary
>>  or desirable, and I would strongly urge that we do not agree to
>>  follow their approach. IMO, the Higgins project has placed far too
>>  much emphasis on this aspect, and the result has warped and distorted
>>  their use of OWL and XSD, which is highly unconventional.
><snip>
>
>It is true that HOWL is a "warped and distorted use of OWL and XSD." We got
>to this point by (a) having a set of requirements (b) selecting OWL 1.0
>because it seemed to be in roughly the right space, looked like it would
>become popular, and had some good tool support and then (c)
>warping/distorting OWL to make it meet our requirements. Unfortunately, as
>has been pointed out, it really only "works" within the narrow Higgins
>community of practice and doesn't interoperate with any efforts of other
>communities.
>
>There are two paths forward for Higgins. One is for someone to step forward
>and educate us on a non-warped, undistorted way that OWL can be used to meet
>the requirements. The other is to abandon OWL and use something more
>expressive (e.g. CLIF, IKF, SUMO-KIF etc.) as has been recently suggested on
>this list. The former would be preferable, but may not be possible.

I don't think it is, no. But there is another path, which is to stick 
with your warped OWL and get it to the point where you can precisely 
state the 'extra' semantic assumptions that your version needs in 
order to support the extra stuff you want, and then publish that as a 
special HOWL version of OWL. It will be nonstandard, but it might be 
of interest to a wider audience, particularly if you have software 
support along with its specification.

Pat


>
>-Paul


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