[LC Response] to UvA (Re: new treatment of anonymous individual really necessary?)

To: Frank van Harmelen <Frank.van.Harmelen@cs.vu.nl>
CC: public-owl-comments@w3.org
Subject: [LC response] To Frank van Harmelen

Dear Frank,

Thank you for your comment
 
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/2009Jan/0037.html>
on the OWL 2 Web Ontology Language last call drafts.

We also note the 'addendum' to your original comment in

<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/2009Feb/0014.html>

And we thank you for helping us avoiding further confusion on this issue.

It is important to note that nothing changed on the RDF side, and that 
the treatment of anonymous individuals in OWL 2 is fully backwards 
compatible with that in OWL 1. Even on the structural syntax side, there 
is no change in expressive power, but we restructured the syntax to be 
in closer correspondence with RDF graphs to make it clearer that 
anonymous individuals are in direct correspondence with blank nodes. In 
the example you mentioned, for example, the "_:1" simply represents a 
blank node in the RDF graph, and this is indeed the only syntactic means 
to define a blank node.

We agree this isn't made very clear in the documents, and we will try to 
improve the presentation. For example, we plan to add some explanatory 
text into the New Features and Rationale document on the change of syntax.

We hope this answers your concerns on this particular issue.

Please acknowledge receipt of this email to 
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suffice). In your acknowledgment please let us know whether or not you 
are satisfied with the working group's response to your comment.

Regards,
Ivan Herman
on behalf of the W3C OWL Working Group

-- 

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
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