Objective 4.6 -- additional semantic information

I have now reached the end of the UC&R document and would like to 
register that I would object (in the sense that if this went to rec I 
would vote against it as an AC member if it included these words) to 
4.6 as written:

It should be possible for knowledge encoded in other semantic 
languages-for example: RDFS, OWL, and SWRL-to affect the results of 
queries executed against RDF graphs.

while I could live with 4.6a

It should be possible for a query to indicate that the answers should 
take into account knowledge encoded in RDF semantic extensions such 
as RDFS, OWL, etc.

This is for two reasons:
  1 - mention of SWRL is problematic -- RDFS and OWL are 
Recommendations that have gone through the full W3C process at great 
cost to participants and to the W3C.  SWRL is just a note w/no WG 
status.   While I like SWRL, and my research group uses it, there's a 
bunch of other systems out there at the same level of informality, 
and it isn't fair for us to mention one and not the others (some of 
which are notes or referenced in notes).    Also, adding SWRL 
confuses rule processing with other kinds of inferencing, and it is 
not clear to me this is an objective of this WG (in fact, I would 
point out that it is probably out of scope given section 2.2 of the 
charter [1])
  2 - the "affect the results of queries" seems to me to be not only 
imprecise, but misleading -- it doesn't say "enhance" or "improve" so 
it could simply mean that that stuff can arbitrarily be taken into 
account in some way -- FWIW, I could achieve what is stated in 4.6 
by saying whenever RDFS or OWL is used the query fails -- which means 
the knowledge has affected the queries.   Seriously, I think the 
second writing, which offers that the SHOULD take into account the 
knowledge, is much clearer as to what the objective actually is

[1]  http://www.w3.org/2003/12/swa/dawg-charter#rules

-- 
Professor James Hendler			  http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler 
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-277-3388 (Cell)