Use of DAML+OIL/SkiCal and iCalendar in DAML+OIL

[Greg FitzPatrick]

Alan and Tony

It has been a while since I worked on this and my memory isn't all that great.

I remember that I was quite enthusiastic about the annotated walkthru created to exemplify  DAML+OIL.  It seemed to me that we could just rewrite the walkthru using SkiCal instead of the existing examples and I started out with that intention, replacing animals with events and so on.

The further I got into this experiment, the more apparent it became to me how artificial the exemplifying ontology of the walkthru was.  Yes, of course it was just a bunch of made up examples, but as I progressed it became increasingly difficult to discern instance from schema.  There seemed to be a slightly tautological aspect to the entire walkthru which I had missed prior to my attempt to reuse it.  

Obviously there is a danger in picking fictional examples out of your head (populating an idea) to exemplify a structure since those examples are always going to fit.   

I am sure all these problems are old hat for others and I am surely the least qualified to criticize DAML+OIL. After the fact I would say that SkiCal just wasn't "hierarchal" enough to make sense in DAML+OIL and I am not quite sure what would be, but Alan has asked for a response, maybe we can talk a bit about this on Wednesday and I can brush up on the work and be more concrete, otherwise I realize that this too is an "argument with out evidence".
            
Greg

P.S.
  
I have jokingly said to Libby and Dan that I think all schema examples should be about aliens and written in at least Russian, or some other language or topic that those involved in the schema work do not understand.  I am sure the "self-evident" nature of the IPO example invariably used in schema walkthroughs (though not in the DAML+OIL instance) have caused considerable damage.

       



-----Original Message-----
From: Alan Rector [mailto:rector at cs.man.ac.uk]
Sent: Sunday, October 06, 2002 12:19 PM
To: tol at star.le.ac.uk
Cc: semantics at us-vo.org; greg at skical.org; danbri at w3.org;
libby.miller at bristol.ac.uk
Subject: Re: Use of DAML+OIL/SkiCal and iCalendar in DAML+OIL


Tony - Dan, Libby and Greg

Thanks to Tony for bringing the paper to our attention.

A question for the authors...

Most of the issues concern namespaces and equivalence which I
shall leave to Sean.

Towards the end of the paper you have an almost throw away comment
that

    "Another significant problem was the awkward syntax and limited
expressivity..."

Leaving aside the awkward syntax, I would be curious to know specific
examples of the  problems with expressivity in your concrete
task.  The reference to Pat Hayes isn't helpful because I know
his theoretical position.  The question is, "What happens in practice?"

I know which things have caused problems in  building
biomedical ontologies.  I think it is very important to know, concretely,
what causes  problems to others in other fields.
Otherwise we are arguing without evidence.

Thanks

Alan

--
Alan L Rector
Professor of Medical Informatics
Department of Computer Science
University of Manchester
Manchester M13 9PL, UK
TEL: +44-161-275-6188/6239/7183
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email: rector at cs.man.ac.uk
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Tony Linde wrote:

> Ran across this paper at:
>   http://www.ilrt.bristol.ac.uk/discovery/2002/03/skical-daml/
>
> It deals with applying DAML+OIL approach to an existing application
> (SkiCal). I'd be interested to get Sean's comments on how they
> approached the problem and their conclusions about DAML+OIL.
>
> (I'll be glad when OWL takes over - it's easier to type!)
>
> Cheers,
> Tony.
>
> __
> Tony Linde                       Phone:  +44 (0)116 223 1292
> AstroGrid Project Manager        Fax:    +44 (0)116 252 3311
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>