[Attempto] OWL_1 -> ACE -> OWL_2

[Normunds Grūzītis]

Hello!

I've been experimenting with Attempto tools for translating ACE to OWL (and vice versa) for a longer time now, trying to look at these things mainly from the domain exper point of a view. From this perspective everything works just fine!

Now I'm interested in the OWL-ACE-OWL roundtrip also (in parallel) from the knowledge engineer point of a view, and I'm facing an issue (behaviour) that didn't worry me much before.

If I pass an ontology OWL_1 to the ACE verbalizer, I get Text_1 that, if passed back to APE, produces OWL_2 that, if verbalized again, produces Text_2.

OWL_2 is semantically equal to OWL_1 (i.e., the reasoning works the same), but syntactically (structurally) they are different (in general). Thus, Text_2 syntactically differs from Text_1 as well - it has been semantically paraphrased. (Actually, axioms of certain patterns are being paraphrased already at the OWL2DRS step - while generating Text_1.)

As I read in Kaarel's dissertation [1] (Section 5.3.2), preserving the structure is considered as *not* important.
While we are considering only the CNL interface (the domain expert point of a view), this makes no problem, but if a knowledge engineer works in parallel (using a different interface and a lower-level formalism), this makes problems: axioms containing allValuesFrom restrictions are "detached" from the respective classes and are converted to general class axioms (using negation and someValuesFrom), disjointWith is converted to complementOf etc. This is not anymore convenient for a Protege user, for instance.

Moreover, instead of (or in parallel with) the engineer (i.e., Protege interface) there could be another (more advanced) domain expert, who uses a graphical notation (e.g., the UML profile for OWL) instead of CNL. In this case the visualization suffers from drammatical changes, and many axioms can not be visualized anymore.

Is there some principal problem, why the structure cannot be (or is hard to be) preserved? It would be useful to have such an *option*. I mean, not a 100% equivalence is important but certain aspects, like:
- the topic-focus articulation should be preserved (e.g., "Every herbivore eats nothing but plants." vs. "Everything that is eaten by a herbivore is a plant.", i.e., allValuesFrom should not be changed to someValuesFrom);
- disjointWith should not be changed to complementOf;
- the unnecesarry owl:Thing references sould not be generated for ".. something that ..";
- and perhaps some other constraints.

Best regards,

Normunds

[1] http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/pubs/papers/phd_kaljurand.pdf