Feedback on XSD 1.1 from the OWL Working Group

Dear XML Schema Working Group,

I thought that it might be interesting and/or useful for you to know
that in the OWL 2 ontology language specification we are making
extensive use of XSD 1.1 datatypes (see, e.g., [1]), and that there
are already successful implementations of OWL tools that support many
of these datatypes (see, e.g., [2]).

For our purposes we found the XSD 1.1 specification to be a
significant improvement and to offer important advantages w.r.t. XSD
1.0 version. These advantages include:

* Generally much improved clarity and precision;

* Clear separation between equality and identity;

* Precise definitions of various operations, such as the
   lexical-to-value mappings for a number of datatypes, and operations
   on data values.

Thanks for all your hard work, and for your timely and helpful
responses to our various comments and queries; we we hope to see XSD
1.1 make rapid progress to Recommendation.

Regards,
Ian Horrocks
W3C OWL Working Group co-Chair

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-owl2-syntax-20090421/#Datatype_Maps
[2] http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/Implementations