On the Expressiveness of the Languages for the Semantic Web - Making a Case for 'A Little More'

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Article

Publication Date

2006

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Abstract

The best pair of shoes you can find are the ones that fit perfectly. No inch too short, no inch too wide or long. The same, of course, holds for applications in all fields of computer science. It should serve our needs perfectly. If it does more, it usually comes with a tradeoff in performance or scalability. On top of that, for logic based systems, the maintenance of a consistent knowledge base is important. Hence a decidable language is needed to maintain this consistency computationally. Recently, the restriction of the Semantic Web standard OWL to bivalent logic has been increasingly criticized for its inability to semantically express uncertainties. We will argue for the augmentation of the current standard to close this gap. We will argue for an increased expressiveness at different layers of the cake and we want to show that only a spiced up version of some of the layers can take the blandness out of it. We want to show that it is possible to have a mixture that can account for reasoning based on uncertainties, possibilistic measures, but also for other epistemologically relevant concepts, such as belief or trust.

DOI

10.1016/S1574-9576(06)80003-1

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