Thursday, February 23, 2006
The Second School of Semantic Science
ontologyMapping Glass Bead Games
On the limits of the OWL standard à [184]
Reading material [1]
Reading material [2]
Reading material [3]
Summary of the discussion up to this point à [186]
Regarding mapping between Object Oriented models and OWL models
The SOA IM (Service Oriented Architecture Information Model)
The rules or thumb for converting OO data schema to OWL would be useful if these can be enumerated.
I had come to feel that there might often be "no" OWL type subclass relationships in the OO paradigm. The concept in OO is that there is an object with private data. Messages are sent between objects. There is an object hierarchy possible. But, perhaps the object hierarchy has more to do with the model of how the computer is working (like the GUI) then the "external world". A certain type of GUI window is a more basic window than the object parent with some changes to the internal data and the behavior (methods). On the other hand, the OWL class hierarchy is designed specifically to support description logic.
Knowledge representation Frames would seem to be more consistent with the OO model, where slot = a property that is a relationship. But again, it is my understanding, likely wrong but I do not know how to correct this understanding, that the Protege Frames notion of a frame is not the same as the notion of a frame (a context) that was developed by Roger Schank.
The Schank notion of frame is consistent with the knowledge management literatures, and things like generalizedFramework theory.
So, it might be that the rules for mapping between OO and OWL would be to flatten the set of "objects", in this case the SOA entities, into a set of classes having no subsumption relationships. Then two types of properties would be defined. One type would be restrictions such as functional and inverse function restriction on individuals? Many of the class restrictions (if I am saying this correctly) like disjoint intersection might not come up in the mapping rules.
One consequence of working through all of the issues regarding the SOA IM model, is that we might be able to address the question about "is there any implicit information that can be shown using a OWL reasoner, once the rules for mapping have been applied to a OO model?"
At this point I cannot even guess. In spite of the perhaps, in some respects, different intended uses for OO and OWL, both are used to organize data, persist data, and offer various means to use the data selectively.
A foundational and informed paper on this mapping task is needed.