Felipe Zschornack Rodrigues Saraiva

COMP34512 Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

Sebastian Brandt

2 May 2014

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Trade-off between formalism

expressivity and cognitive
complexity
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One advantage of increase a formalitys expressivity is to better capture the semantics

of a concept explicitly and formally, reducing ambiguity. Another advantage is the possibility
of advanced inferencing, which can contribute to maintain a system consistent, and to
enhance possibilities for querying.

But modelling and creating a Knowledge Representation is not trivial, so the use of an
expressive formalism will require additional effort to understand its syntax and semantics, in
the way it can be consistently applied and interpreted: high expressivity allowing for complex
language constructs might overstrain and scare most users away. That is the reason why
some Lightweight ontologies has appeared: people realised that flat ontologies can also be
very useful.

Also, the evolution and maintenance of a ontology is very important, so the ontology
has to be a good user community. Some researches indicates that exists a trade-off between
an ontologys degree of detail and expressiveness and the achievable community size
because the more detailed the ontology the fewer people will be willing to dedicate the
resources for reviewing it prior to adopting it. And it is important to complete understand a
formalism, because seldom an individual or organisation will authorise all the inferences that
are to be drawn from a particular ontology if they cant understand them up front.

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Maybe one good example is the construct rdfs:subClassOf . It obviously add

expressivity to the formalism (representation of class inclusion), but its exact meaning/
semantics (logical implication) is not clearly understand by common students.

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References

1. Siorpaes, K., Hepp, M.: MyOntology: The Marriage of Collective Intelligence and
Ontology Engineering. In: Proceedings of the Workshop Bridging the Gap between Semantic
Web and Web 2.0, ESWC (2007)

2. R. Cornet, A. Abu-Hanna: Usability of expressive description logicsa case study in

UMLS, Proc. AMIA Symp. (2002)

3. Hepp, M.: Possible Ontologies: How Reality Constrains the Development of

Relevant Ontologies. IEEE Internet Computing, 2007.

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