RE: philosophy of SWBPD (was Re: [OPEN] and/or [PORT] : a practical question)

RE: philosophy of SWBPD (was Re: [OPEN] and/or [PORT] : aLike Jim,

I find this anecdote uncompelling, and more a comment on the inadequacy of
the conference terms of reference and/or review. Personally I don't think
that papers that have little to do with the semantic web are appropriate at
a semantic web conference, although I note that the call-for-papers
typically do not reflect this. (At least once I have played the role of "mr
difficult on the floor" questioning the relevance of a paper on these
grounds; I expect to do that again)

Of course, some papers may be about enabling technologies, and never
actually articulate how they connect with the web - that's a flaw, but often
not fatal.

Jeremy

  -----Original Message-----
  From: public-swbp-wg-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-swbp-wg-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Uschold, Michael F
  Sent: 17 April 2004 06:23
  To: Jim Hendler; NANNI Marco FTRD/DMI/SOP; SWBPD
  Cc: Ian Horrocks (E-mail); Clark, Peter E; Sean Bechhofer (E-mail)
  Subject: RE: philosophy of SWBPD (was Re: [OPEN] and/or [PORT] : a
practical question)


  Jim Hendler says:



  I guess it would be possible for using OWL separately from the Web, but
that is sort of like talking about using HTML separate from the Web -- why
would you want to?   Seems a pretty borderline case.





  Here is your borderline case, and may help to explain the context of my
earlier remarks. We wrote a paper that got accepted last year's ISWC
conference that used DAML+OIL. The application had little if anything
specifically to do with the Web, we just used DAML+OIL because it was an
emerging standard ontology representation language, and we had a
classification problem that was amenable to DL reasoning. DAML+OIL, of
course evolved from OIL, which also had nothing specifically to do with the
Web.



  I was hesitant to submit the paper on the basis of this dubious relevance.
It smacked too much of "if your program is in lisp or prolog, then you must
be doing AI". My co-authors over-ruled my concerns and I was proved wrong.
The paper got accepted and I gave the talk to a room that was 80-100% full
of people.  The predominant situation does indeed seem to be that it if you
use DAML+OIL (or OWL) then it must be relevant to the Semantic Web (or at
least, be of interest to the Semantic Web community).



  Work on this project continues, and if we ever make it a Web application,
that will be independent from our choice to use DAML+OIL/OWL.  So, I guess
we are not using any of the webby portions of OWL, and to date have not seen
a need to (as far as I understand the webby vs. non-webby portions of OWL).



  See: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~horrocks/ISWC2003/UCDF03a.html