What Is OWL Good For?

October 28, 2008

Heres another middle-of-the-night-while-travelling post. Its about OWL. Last week, the W3C OWL Working Group decided that it was essentially done with the design of the OWL 2 language. All that remains is some editorial work and fixing bugs that might crop up. In W3C process terminology, the Working Group decided it was (mostly) ready for Last Call of its multi-part specification. Happily, its pretty much onschedule Ive been the primary W3C staff contact for this Working Group, and I was the secondary staff contact for the OWL 1 Working Group for its last six months (back in 2003-2004). Ive tried to support both groups however I could, in infrastructure, process advice, management advice, and in some limitted areas with technical design advice. But, awkwardly, Im not really an OWL user, so I sometimes feel like this OWL work is only my day job. Thats okay lots of us do things for work that were not passionate about but it isnt how I usually operate. More interestingly, its kind of odd. I mean, OWL is on the very short list of Semantic Web standards, and Im quite passionate about decentralization, which is more-or-less what the Semantic Web is about. So why am I not passionate about OWL?

Personal Reasons?
Okay, there may be some personal reasons. Ill describe them in the hope of factoring them out, and in the hope of generally learning more about how people interact with standards committees. 1. Although I was involved fairly near the beginning of work on OWL, I still feel late-to-the-party. For me, when Im late to a party, I tend to have a nagging feeling that I missed something important, and I stay very cautious. Im less likely to become enthusiastic. Perhaps because of that, or perhaps because Im not a Description Logics researcher, I dont feel like part of the in-crowd even though I know and like and feel personally comfortable with many people who are. I dont think I could ever get into the top tier of experts in either OWL implementation or OWL usage. There are some very, very smart people who have been dedicated to those subjects for years already. I doubt I could catch up. These wouldnt stop me from being an implementor (I did one strange OWL implementation called surnia) and/or user, but it makes it harder for me to feel ownership. Maybe thats related to excitement.

2. 3.

Technical Reasons?
The important issue here, though, is technical. Is OWL important for decentralization? Perhaps it is, but Im not convinced. Really, my gut says no, the experts say yes, and Im just confused. And so we end up with a blog post. What purposes might OWL serve?

1.

It might be a data interface definition language, along the lines of BNF, ASN.1, and XML Schema, except on some subtley-different level. Decentralized systems certainly need something like this some computer format for defining the interfaces but is it OWL? (cf my work last year on asn07 (rif wiki, rif email)). Some people tell me its entirely unsuitable for this; some people say theyve been using it for this for years.

2.

It might give people some computer support for defining a vocabulary, something like a spell-checker helps people writing prose. I have the feeling this is where the core Ontology community is. In this view, OWL is there to help you find errors and get insights into your vocabulary specification (aka your ontology). It might be used as a declarative programming language for expressing Semantic Web shims, the transformations needed so systems using related-but-different RDF vocabularies can interoperate. But maybe this is better done with RIF or conventional programming languages? This is the Ontology Mapping problem. Clearly OWL isnt expressive enough to do all kinds of mapping, and it probably is the best option for trivial kinds of mapping (stuff that just uses owl:sameAs), but what about everything in between?

3.

Sometimes in standards work there is constructive ambiguity in the spec and also in the charter. It makes the technology easier to sell, and draws in a wide base of potential support. What is this technology for? Well, its for lots of things. It might be just what you need! If the charter were more specific, picking out only points 1, 2, or 3, then wed have a narrower spec, serving a narrower community. Maybe serving it better, but still with fewer economies of scale and network effects. If we look back at the OWL Use Cases and Requirements, we see use cases somewhat in line with these three options, although taking a rather different approach. The first two are about using automated reasoning in mapping between vocabularies; thats sort of number 3, but with human vocabularies la wordnet. The other four are less clear cut. Number five look like classic decentralization, but I dont see any case being made for OWL in there. Number six looks like classic planning; is OWL the best logic language for automated planning? Anyway, Id love to hear comments (below or via trackback/pingback) about what you think OWL is good for. [Oh, look, it sounds like there's some interesting discussion of this going on atOWLED. A shame I wasn't up for travelling three weeks in a row.] Please note that Im really not complaining about OWL. Im fairly comfortable with its design, and quite happy with the design process. Im just saying that I have trouble seeing why its as cool as some people seem to think it is. Maybe Im missing something. Maybe my goals are different. Maybe its utility is exactly the same to both of us, and for whatever reason it doesnt turn me on the same way. Im just trying to understand that.

In corpus linguistics, part-of-speech tagging (POS tagging or POST), also called grammatical tagging or word-categorydisambiguation, is the process of marking up a word in a text (corpus) as corresponding to a particular part of speech, based on both its definition, as well as its contexti.e. relationship with adjacent and related words in a phrase, sentence, or paragraph. A simplified form of this is commonly taught to school-age children, in the identification of words as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc. Once performed by hand, POS tagging is now done in the context of computational linguistics, using algorithms which associate discrete terms, as well as hidden parts of speech, in accordance with a set of descriptive tags. POS-tagging algorithms fall into two distinctive groups: rule-based and

stochastic. E. Brill's tagger, one of the first and widely used English POS-taggers, employs rule-based algorithms.