Re: ISSUE-3: REPORTED: Lack of anonymous individuals

On 8 Nov 2007, at 11:12, <gstoil@image.ece.ntua.gr> wrote:

>
> Boris Motik <boris.motik@comlab.ox.ac.uk> said:
>
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> The OWL 1.1 Member Submission does not contain anonymous  
>> individuals for the
> reasons I explain below. These reasons are related to
>> ISSUE-46: Unnamed Individual Restrictions
> (http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/tracker/issues/46). It might make sense  
> to discuss
> both issues
>> together.
>>
>> In short, we did not include the anonymous individuals into the  
>> Member
> Submission because they significantly affect computational
>> aspects of the logic (explained under item 1 below). Furthermore,  
>> anonymous
> individuals are usually used in practice with a weaker
>> semantics (explained under item 2 below). Therefore, we did not  
>> introduce
> anonymous individuals in the Member Submission and wanted
>> to discuss this in the working group.
>>
>>
>>
>> 1. Why can nontree-like "true" anonymous individuals be dangerous?
>>
>> Nontree-like "true" anonymous individuals in the ABox cause  
>> undecidability
> of ontology entailment, which is the basic inference
>> problem for OWL. An ABox containing anonymous individuals can  
>> actually be
> understood as a conjunctive query. It is well known that
>
> Hi Boris,
>
> Is it a conjunctive query or a union of conjunctive queries?
>

Hi Giorgos,

this dangerous stems from single conjunctive queries: see

http://www.inf.unibz.it/~calvanese/papers/calv-degi-lenz-PODS-98.pdf
or
http://www.springerlink.com/content/5g64t33487111134/fulltext.pdf


> BTW, can you explain more how you can view anonymous individuals as  
> CQs?
>

simply because, if you allow them in an ontology, then you can reduce  
entailment of CQs to entailment between ontologies: simply view the  
CQ as an ontology with anonymous individuals!

The reason why skolem constants are more harmless is because they are  
simply names for ___domain elements like normal constants (but the  
"anonymous individuals as skolem constants" would free you from  
having to invent a proper name for them)  -- and, when you are trying  
to see whether an interpretation is a model of an ontology, you don't  
need to find an appropriate mapping!

Cheers, Uli

> Best,
> G. Stoilos

Received on Thursday, 8 November 2007 11:27:13 UTC