Re: DQL ontology

From: tim finin ([email protected])
Date: 08/20/02

  • Next message: Deborah McGuinness: "Re: DQL ontology"
    pat hayes wrote:
    > Er..guys, I havnt looked at the details of this, and maybe I have
    > misunderstood what you are doing; but there seems to me to be
    > something fundamentally wrong with the very idea of having an
    > ontology for queries. 
    > ...
    
    I felt a little odd calling it a DQL ontology.  What we are
    doing, of course, is developing a way to *encode* DQL query
    objects (and their responses) in DAML+OIL.  In building our
    multiagent systems we are trying to use DAML+OIL and RDF as the
    representations of choice.  We are also following the FIPA model,
    which requires conventional ways to encode certain things (e.g.,
    propositions, actions, queries) for any FIPA compliant content
    language. The actual query, of course, is the use of the
    appropriate speech act with content describing a query object.
    
    Part of our research agenda is to explore how semantic web
    languages can be used in multiagent systems.  Our strategy is to
    use them promiscuously and thereby find out where they provide
    real value and where they just cause problems.  Many of these
    things can only, IMHO, be determined through experimentation.
    
    A few final comments on using DAML+OIL to encode DQL queries:
    
      DAML+OIL is not the *ideal* language for describing the query
      object (in fact, I doubt that it's the ideal language for
      describing anything).  It does allow us to capture some aspects
      of DQL, such as cardinality constraints on the DQL components.
    
      Using DAML+OIL to encode DQL queries provides a good way to
      publish query objects in web pages and other documents and to
      store them in databases and knowledge bases.
    
      If DQL queries or at least query objects are represented in
      DAML+OIL it will facilitate reasoning *about* the queries.  There
      are times when you might want to do this, such as for query
      optimization or to prove that one query object "subsumes"
      another.
    
      Following these arguments to their logical conclusion suggests we
      should use DAML+OIL to encode things at the speech act level. For
      practical reasons, I'm not suggesting we do that yet, but we might
      at some point.
    
    Tim
    


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