First-order logic is necessary and sufficient to specify any and every program that runs
on a digital computer. But OWL 2 is limited, quirky, and far more difficult to learn and
use that FOL.
Recommendation: Design OWL 3 as exactly compatible with the OWL 2 hierarchy, but replace
Turtle or other notations for the constraint language with an easy to read, write, and
remember version of FOL. For upward compatibility, keep all the OWL 2 features and syntax
as an option which shall remain available in all future upgrades to OWL 3.
Syntax for the OWL 3 constraint language: The reserved words and phrases that are used
to represent constraints: Some; Every; and; or; not; if... then,,,; only if; if and only
if.
Every statement in the constraint language shall be a syntactically correct English
sentence, which uses the reserved words above plus whatever words or symbols anybody
chooses to represents entities in the subject domain.
Result: Statements in the constraint language may be read without any training by anybody
who can read English. Learning to write the constraint language will require much less
training than learning to write anything in OWL 2.
Observation: The very intelligent logicians who designed OWL 1 and 2, made an incorrect
assumption about issues of decidability.
(1) undecidable statements are very complex, and nobody but a highly trained and
knowledgeable logician would know how to write one,; 99.99% of software developers would
not know how to read or write such a statement.
(2) Undecidable statements only cause a problem for a theorem prover; they would NEVER
cause any problem if and when they are used to state a constraint and use a constraint.
(3) But the syntactic constraints to prevent undecidable statements cause Turtle and other
notations to become far more complex, unreadable, and unwritable than pure simple FOL
expressed as English sentences,
(4) For authors who do not read or write English, it's easy to specify exactly
equivalent versions in every language spoken at the United Nations. Every one of those
versions would have a simple and efficient translation to the English version.
John
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