| Sorry for my imprecision. Yes, OWL can be used like that, and automatic tagging is one of the few good use cases. But in reality A-Box completion is not the big use case for OWL. T-Box model checking is. All those fancy bioinformatics ontologies and "databases" that get paraded around by the Dl folks. All those lower ontologies. There is not a single A-Box fact describing genes, diseases, products, objects or whatever. It's all T-Box concepts. I mean, there's papers lamenting common RDF database T-Box size and performance limitations, because they want to collect medical data, but have to shoehorn it into the ontology. That's also something that the authors don't seem to get. Shacl popped up because people wanted to have something that operstes over their A-Boxes without slowly dragging their entire modeling and data storage into the T-Box.
That's why they don't want the "description logic perspective", as it automatically leads down that "no instances, just theories" rabbit hole. As an aside. Even if OWL was used for classification only. It'd be rather moot. So you've classified something as a manager. Once you act in it, e.g. by having a query that only asks for manager entities, you are stuck with the same brittle class based approach, where the query requires more constraints than it actually needs.
The query already contains all the properties required, it's its own anonymous classification so to speak. |
Unfortunately logic is a depressing subject because it starts with a bunch of theorems about what is impossible (Gödel, Tarski,Turing.) There is no system of negation that is without problems (OWL takes the radical choice of no negation) Commonsense reasoning involves a lot of "Alice thinks that Jane thinks that..." and "A was true until 12:30 this afternoon, now A is false".
The theory vs interpretation split is another one of those decisions you have to make if you want to do logic: I am on a committee where I'm the guy who speaks for interpretations and the A-Box but some of the other people are serious T-Boxers.
It amazes me that this system
http://inform7.com/
creates an illusion of letting an English major write a script for an adventure game that reads like English that someone can play in what looks like a subset of English. It does it all with a very primitive production rules engine that relies heavily on defaults. Practical logic requires attention to rules and "schemes" (X macros, configuration settings on the rules engine.) I wrote an adventure game with a few rooms and objects in Drools and dreamt of making something like "Inform 7 for business rules".