draft response for LC comment 53

[Response for LC Comment 53]

Dear Jonathan,

Thank you for your message
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/2009Feb/0000.html
on the OWL 2 Web Ontology Language last call drafts.

The allowable ontologies OWL 2 DL form a syntactic subset of the OWL 2
Full ontologies.  For example, manipulation of the OWL built-in
vocabulary in certain ways is not allowable in OWL 2 DL but is allowable
in OWL 2 Full.  Similarly, use of properties as both object properties
and data properties is not allowed in OWL 2 DL but is allowed in OWL 2
Full.

Imports closures is another example where the syntax of OWL 2 DL is less
permissive than the syntax of OWL 2 Full.  In OWL 2 DL, if incompatible
ontologies are imported then the ontology is considered syntactically
invalid.  In OWL 2 Full, importing of incompatible ontologies is
syntactically valid (to allow any RDF as syntactically valid OWL 2
Full).  It is the intention of the WG that in OWL 2 Full such importing
produces semantic inconsistency, although this is not yet in the OWL 2
Full Semantics document.

This extends the situation in OWL 1, where owl:incompatibleWith had no
formal meaning, resulting in confusion as to exactly what it was
supposed to be used for.

Although the two definitions of imports (in OWL 2: Syntax and OWL 2:
RDF-Based Semantics) are different in form, they are the same in
behaviour.  The WG will modify the wording in Section 2 of the OWL 2:
RDF-Based Semantics document, which is not yet at last call, to conform
more closely to the wording in the OWL 2: Syntax document, and may
indeed make it point to the OWL 2: Syntax document.


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,
Peter F. Patel-Schneider
on behalf of the W3C OWL Working Group

Received on Friday, 13 February 2009 14:37:10 UTC