Re: review of Document Overview

> >>> 2.4/ Profiles:
>
> >>> Remove Figure 2, as it serves no useful purpose.
>
> I'm baffled as to what purpose you think this figure serves and why  
> its loss will be mourned. AFAICT, the information content of the  
> figure is:
> ...

It's not intended to provide additional information; it's about
presentation.  It's intended to make the relationship between the
profiles feel as simple as it actually is.  A simple-looking diagram
conveys that feeling much more effectively, I think, than the text.

But perhaps that's just me, so I'm okay with letting it go until/unless
others speak up for it.

> >>> Could remove the subsection headers, as the subsections are all very
> >>> short.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> Change "albeit under a possibly different name." to
> >>>        "albeit possibly under different names."
> >>>
> >>> Remove "; it also has a formal equivalence to UML [UML]."
> >>>        This is just *wrong*.
> >>>
> >>> 3.2:
> >>>       Just put this stuff elsewhere (perhaps in Primer).
> >>
> >> I significantly shortened the whole of Section 3 and pointed to NF&R
> >> for detailed explanation/documentation.
> >>
> >> I also renamed it "Relationship to OWL 1" as this seems more
> >> appropriate and avoids the negative connotations of "differences".
> >
> > Very nice, except that we need a link explaining the "almost"s in
> > paragraph two to a place with text like Peter and I were crafting
> > yesterday.  If I were an OWL 2 user, I would insist the text  
> > actually be
> > normative, too.  (I guess there's no problem with a little normative
> > text in NF&R.)
> >
> > Am I the only one who thinks OWL 1 users will want to know, in no
> > uncertain terms, whether OWL 2 breaks their stuff, BEFORE they accept
> > OWL 2?
> 
> This is *exactly* what I am trying to achieve here.
> 
> > Figuring that out by sifting through our entire spec seems a bit
> > much to ask.
> 
> That isn't the intention. The intention is to tell them that  
> everything is fine, *which it is*. IMHO this message, we should *not*  
> provide irrelevant information about the corner cases and "bug-fixes"  
> in OWL 2 that prevent us from simply saying that it is *completely*  
> backwards compatible with OWL 1 -- this does need to be documented  
> somewhere, but not here (not sure if it should be normative and/or in  
> NF&R, but this is a different issue that I will address in another  
> email).
> 
> I changed what is said here to make the message even more clear: it  
> now says that "backwards compatibility with OWL 1 is, to all intents  
> and purposes, complete" and that inferences are identical "in all  
> practical cases". I also added a note explaining that "even the  
> theoretical possibility of different entailments arises only from a  
> change in the treatment of annotations in the Direct Semantics [OWL 2  
> Direct Semantics] that reflects what was typically implemented in OWL  
> 1 systems". I'm ambivalent about this note -- we could simply say  
> "see XXX for more details".

Okay, yeah, I think this works.  I'd leave off the note and put a link
to the appropriate non-normative section of NF&R, so if people want to
double check whether they agree with our notion of "all intents and
purposes" and "impractical", they easily can.

> BTW, given that the differences in entailments only affect OWL DL and  
> derive from changes in the Direct Semantics, it seems to me that this  
> is the right place to document them.

I'd lean towards having the change descriptions grouped together, for
those people who care about the changes.  In the future, hopefully,
folks reading the OWL 2 DL specs wont care how it differed from OWL 1
DL.

      -- Sandro

Received on Friday, 3 April 2009 19:03:06 UTC