Re: review of Document Overview

As per your suggestion I removed the one sentence explanation of the  
meaning of "to all intents and purposes", replacing it with a pointer  
to NF&R. This will need to be fixed to a more precise reference to  
the location of the relevant section when it has been added.

I heard different opinions about Figure 2, so I didn't do anything on  
that pending a decision from the WG. It seems slightly ridiculous for  
such a minor issue, but I suggest that we put it on this weeks agenda  
for discussion and disposition vote on it.

Ian


On 3 Apr 2009, at 20:02, Sandro Hawke wrote:

>
>>>>> 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 Monday, 6 April 2009 09:17:47 UTC