Saturday, February 11, 2006
Generative Methodology Glass Bead Games
On using RDF to model web services
Andrea Proli’s
related communication à [166]
Please excuse the posting to both forums, as this discussion belongs in both forums.
Rinke,
Thank you for your thoughtful message. I posted this at
http://www.bcngroup.org/beadgames/generativeMethodology/163.htm
with a few short footnotes..
At
http://www.bcngroup.org/beadgames/generativeMethodology/164.htm
I posted a more extensive discussion of the issues you raise.
I hope that we might take this discussion off the Protege - owl forum, but we are interested in continuing to talk about and reveal the issues related to translation of other paradigms, such as the OASIS SOA-IM (service oriented architecture information model) to OWL.
While we realize that Protege is a research environment, the critical market need is for interoperability between the W3C based (lay-cake) logic based ontology, and other representations of human or computer transaction spaces.
The effort my group is making exposes some difficulties in simply taking a simple RDF file, produced using the new commercial Altova RDF editor, and importing this to Protege as pure RDF. It is likely that the difficulty stems from our misunderstanding of how namespaces are used, but that is conjectural on my part.
The import issue arises in other context, such as the import of the BioPAX ontology. This import can be done but one has to understand a complicated process having many decisions, where each decision requires the "researcher's" understanding of the state of the current version. It is a moving target, which I am sure is well known by the Stanford team members.
I do not speak for the BioPAX working group. But I know that they have chosen to use Protege-OWL rather than Protege-frames for various reasons, in spite the traditional choice of Protege-frames for bio-medical ontology.
Part of the reason is that BioPAX is designed to be consistent with the notions that Alan Rector uses in "Defaults, Context, and Knowledge Alternatives for OWL-Indexed Knowledge bases" ...
<Quote>
Page 2
".. despite the benefits of logic-based formalisms such as OWL, the inability to express defaults and exceptions is a serious limitations"
One can down load this paper and read the full paragraph, and text.
Many individuals see the limitations, not only as discussed by Alan Rector, but also the deeper root causes of these limitations as expressed in the philosophy of mathematics.
In spite of this, we see the possibility that OWL constructions are "almost" ready to instrument a "Semantic Web" so that (quoting Rector) "the use of the logic based ontology as an index to contingent information ..." is available within various fields including medicine.