On Jan 25, 2012, at 5:30 PM, Bob Morris wrote:
my own present position is that reasoning on data described by an ontology is way more interesting than reasoning on the ontology itself
I actually don't disagree with that. But the degree to which it is interesting still depends on how richly you can reason. I'm not saying that the ability to infer that an element of the data is an instance of one class and not an instance of 10 other classes isn't useful in some cases, but by itself that's also not very rich yet.
If, however, our ontology contained assertions about the members of a class, for example in the form of property restrictions, or if classes are in rich subclass and/or partonomy hierarchies, you could infer more about those instances.
Just for clarification for the Bob Morrises among us who enjoy jumping a step ahead :-) I myself am right now just trying to ascertain whether my understanding of DSW is correct or not.
-hilmar