Re: DAML+OIL Expressivity Question

From: Jim Hendler (james.hendler@verizon.net)
Date: 11/08/01


Deb-
  think you missed my point.  Instead of making humans figure out that 
instead of

<daml:foo> xxx </daml:foo>

they should do

<daml:bar
    <daml:toRestriction
       <daml:max-cardinality> 22 </daml:maxcardinality>
       <daml:subclass> zippy </daml:subclass>
       <daml:subclass> pippy </daml:subclass>
    <daml:toRestriction>
   baz bang
  </daml:bar>

we could put daml:foo in the language, and let the theorem provers 
and other tools "expand it" in some way to the correct meaning.

Another way to say this is to remember that minimality is not 
necessarily a good thing -- even though we can do logic with just OR 
and NOT, it is still useful to have AND and IMPLY  (or to have both 
addition and subtraction signs in math)  Sometimes making the 
language "more complicated" (by adding an extra word) can actually 
make it simpler for users -- and since it is a necessary criterion, 
and one which I will hold the webont WG to, that users must NOT have 
to take a KR class to use webont, we may need to make some tradeoffs 
in the real world...
  -JH
-- 
Professor James Hendler				  hendler@cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
AV Williams Building, Univ of Maryland		  College Park, MD 20742
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler


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