DescriptionGraphs

From OWLED-Wiki

Rationale

Description Graphs are a recent addition to Description Logics. They allow a clump of interrelated properties, in the form of a graph, to be part of a Description Logic knowledge base. Interest has been expressed in incorporating Description Graphs into OWL and in trying to weaken the strong division between properties in the graph part of a knowledge base and properties in the other part of a knowledge base.

What is Needed

DG properties have to be disjoint from "OWL" properties. How can this be made palatable? Can the constraints be weakened?

Better tooling is needed, e.g., augmenting the language for Protege to incorporate a graphical interface. GML does some of this, but it is not very robust.

We should try taking good ideas from other communities (e.g., product modelling) in the area of graphical user interfaces. It is best to involve them, but what do we give to them - reasoning? The other communities have interest and can supply secondary reasoning tasks (e.g., part explosion comparisons), which can also be of interest to us.

We should try to build ontologies that have DG components using nascent tools, so that more complete tools have good examples to validate their decisions. This requires work from very early adopters.

We note that the the biggest tooling challenge - reasoners - has a solution - Hermit. We need practical experience to drive next set of tools. We should talk to potential user communities to find out what they need. We need to get Hermit's implmentation of DGs finished, if needed, and make sure there is some "lashed together" way to build ontologies with DG components.