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   Re: [xml-dev] equivalentTo vs. XSLT

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Paul Prescod wrote,
> Miles Sabin wrote:
> > I don't think anyone would say that using XSLT transforms to map
> > between vocabularies is in any interesting sense a SW technology.
> > And yet it seems to be enough to cover one of the primary use-cases
> > for OWL.
>
> Yes, if you don't care about reliability, performance, security or
> using specs as they were designed to be used, then XSLT can be used to
> handle some carefully chosen subset of OWL's use-cases.

Carefully chosen? I thought _you_ chose the use-case as a demonstration 
of how SW technologies solve real practical problems better than the 
alternatives. Oh well ...

And I'm mildly astonished that you think that XSLT and it's 
implementations are so poor, and that transformations aren't what it 
was designed to express!

<snip/>
> > I don't believe that any logic that's likely to be interesting in
> > this kind of context is decidable.
>
> Why not? What evidence do you have that OWL is not in general
> decidable?

None ... I'm quite well aware of the fact that DLs are decidable. I 
simply question the value of something that's so expressively 
impoverished for general vocabulary to vocabulary mapping.

For example, consider a mapping from,

  <foo>
    <dimensions>
       <height>2</height>
       <width>4</width>
       <depth>10</depth>
    </dimensions>
  </foo>

to,

  <bar>
    <volume>80</volume>
  </bar>

  (ie. volume = height*width*depth)

Surely not a completely bizarre type of transformation to want in many 
domains, and implementable in any number of ways. But it's not 
expressible in OWL/DL.

Expressive power, decidability: pick one.

<snip/>
> The more information you give the computer about what you are trying
> to accomplish, the more it can help you. OWL lets me tell the computer
> a bunch of things I know about a vocabulary and let it decide when 
> particular bits of information become relevant. There is a rich body
> of knowledge around how to do this using semantic languages and I
> don't see why I should cut myself off from them out of an instinctual
> fear of anything that looks like AI.

Good luck ... ;-)

Cheers,


Miles




 

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