FW: TopQuadrant response to OWL2 LC

[send to WG list only for internal discussion]

>From the "Other Comments" section:

[[
DisjointUnion and DisjointClasses
    Being syntactic sugar, these new primitives are strictly speaking unnecessary. There form in RDF triples is very different from the equivalent disjointWith statements and are significantly harder to process for OWL implementations that work natively over RDF, rather than by first translating into OWL axioms. It seems unlikely that many RDF based OWL implementations (OWL Full implementations) will correctly implement these constructs. Hence these constructs are likely to lead to interoperability failure between OWL Full and OWL DL systems. The costs of such failure are much higher than the costs of requiring users who need such constructs to use the somewhat funky styles required by OWL1. These features should be dropped.
]]

Being syntactic sugar is certainly, at least in general, not a sufficient reason to drop a feature. We had this in OWL 1, either, e.g.:

  * owl:equivalentClass sugars rdfs:subClassOf

  * owl:AllDifferent sugars a set of binary owl:sameAs assertions

Whatever problems there will be in OWL 2 for DisjointClasses ("very different from the equivalent binary statements", etc.), it won't be different from the problems for AllDifferent in OWL 1, because it's the same kind of both syntactical encoding and semantics.

FWIW, from the perspective of a vendor of a "real-world" modeling tool, /I/ would rather be happy about getting direct language support for the useful DisjointUnion and DisjointClasses modeling patterns. And didn't the Protege/OWL plugin have wizzards for exactly this? Just an opinion.

Michael

-----Original Message-----
From: public-owl-comments-request@w3.org [mailto:public-owl-comments-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Jeremy Carroll
Sent: Monday, January 26, 2009 10:51 PM
To: public-owl-comments@w3.org
Subject: TopQuadrant response to OWL2 LC


As indicated on Friday, here is the completed comment.
There have been some wording improvements from the earlier draft.

Jeremy Carroll, as TopQuadrant AC Rep

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