Temporally Qualified Continuants (TQC) for BFO 2 OWL - after discussions in Buffalo, May 2013

This is a short update of the TQC approach during the BFO2 meeting in Buffalo 
and some iterations afterwards, done by Janna Hastings, Stefan Schulz, and 
Fabian Neuhaus, getting very useful feedback by Alan Ruttenberg and Barry 
Smith. 

This is work in progress, and it should not be recommended (just as other, 
competing approached) for community adoption until all the technical details of 
these approaches have been fully worked out and evaluated. The existing 
agreement to release BFO OWL with an official subset that exludes the 
temporalized relations (and corresponding adoption of atemporal relations in RO 
for the meantime) is consistent with this requirement. 

The main idea of the TQC approach is that it allows a simpler relation 
hierarchy (no TRs) and has as default (simplest) case permanent generic 
relatedness.  However, this is at the expense of requiring a proliferation of 
instances (as instantiation is necessarily time-region-linked). There are still 
open questions as to how the approach would work out for all the different 
types of relation and all the properties that relations might have in OWL.  

Next steps, as agreed with Alan, will that we will work together, within a 
short time frame, to apply both approaches (Alan's TRs and the new TQCs) to a 
defined set of core use cases (instantiation of non-rigid classes, permanent 
generic parthood, and so on) and thereby evaluate the approaches side-by-side 
with regard to important community considerations such as usability, 
complexity, formal correctness, ease of migration for existing ontologies, and 
importantly time to perform reasoning over large ontologies with actual OWL 
implementations.

The output of this process (within two months) will be a substantially revised 
version of what is now the TQC paper draft 
(https://bfo.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/docs/TQC/TQC-current.pdf) that not only 
presents one of the approaches but instead thoroughly compares and evaluates 
both approaches side by side. This would then serve as a basis for community 
participation in the decision process as to which method BFO OWL "officially" 
adopts - or indeed, whether we sanction both and allow users to choose which 
they adopt. 

The current state of the TQC approach is summarized in this slideset:

https://bfo.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/docs/Temporally_Qualified_Continuants_BFO2_
Buffalo20130521.pptx

paralleled by an example owl file

https://bfo.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/ontology/owl-schulz/tqc6.owl

Comments and suggestions are welcome!

Original issue reported on code.google.com by steschu@gmail.com on 27 May 2013 at 8:57

zhengj2007 / bfo-export

Temporally Qualified Continuants (TQC) for BFO 2 OWL - after discussions in Buffalo, May 2013 #179