RE: My answers to Jie Bao's review of the Full Semantics

Bijan Parsia answered to Michael Schneider:

>> I do not intend to add such figures. Being only examples, they are
>> purely informative, and thus would rather be something to put in
>> the Primer, not in the technical spec.
>
>Uhm...no. The primer is intended for a general audience. It's
>definitely not going to spend a lot of time directly talking about
>model theory.

Ok, I agree. That would be a bit exaggerated. :)

>The rationale for putting diagrams in the technical spec would be to
>make *it* more accessible. Since OWL Full style semantics is rather
>out of the way from common, first orderish semantics, it might be
>necessary to make the document more accessible even to experts! That
>is, it might be helpful to have some didactic material.

But the relevant aspects which distinguish OWL Full as an RDF-based semantics from OWL DL as a description logic-based semantics (everything, including properties, classes and datatypes, is an individual; classes and properties have extensions associated to them instead of being those sets and relations themselves; the same individual can play different roles in parallel) can be pretty well learnt from reading the RDF Semantics spec, which has a lot of explanatory text within. 

So I see no big win in bloating the Full Semantics document with such stuff -- except, perhaps, for a sentence saying: "If you want to learn the basics, read the RDF Semantics!". But the Full Semantics refers to the RDF Semantics a lot of times, anyway, beginning with the first sentence of the introduction. And it is no secret that the Full Semantics document is not a self contained document, but builds on the content of the RDF Semantics document. So readers unfamiliar with all this non-standard stuff will need to go to the RDF Semantics, anyway.

>But I would wait until the basic technical work is done, for sure.

There will still be some significant work to be done after WD1 and before LC, and LC is already visible at the horizon. 

>Cheers,
>Bijan.

Cheers,
Michael

--
Dipl.-Inform. Michael Schneider
FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik Karlsruhe
Abtl. Information Process Engineering (IPE)
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