Re: Triples and OWL2

Jan,

Thanks for these comments. I suggest you post these to
<public-owl-comments@w3.org>, the comments list of the OWL2 group.

Thanks,
Guus


Jan Wielemaker wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm not a regular member of this forum, but as a developer of the
> SWI-Prolog Semantic Web infrastructure I hear some things ... some
> of which are worrying ...
> 
> I have had some discussions about OLW2. Many of the semantic extensions
> have my support, although I doubt the number of users that actually
> needs them is sufficient to warrant early standardisation at this level.
> 
> What is worrying me is to destroy the semantic web stack, going
> 
>   (1)	serialisation --> triples --> semantics
> 
> The OWL2 initiative seems to change this entire stack, producing
> something like this (with some complicated scenario that guarantees some
> level of compatibility):
> 
>   (2)	serialisation --> triples --> semantics
> 			                 ^
> 			  another serialisation
> 
> [if you use a variable-pitch font: <another serialisation> points
> *directly* to <semantics>]
> 
> This upsets my entire toolchain, which is based on the assumption of
> model (1). Now, of course, some people may think this is just my
> problem. I believe this is not the case. If we re-introduce the
> immediate mapping from syntax to semantics, we are likely to fall into
> the same trap from which knowledge representation formats suffered for
> decades: different syntaxes with 90% semantic overlap that are hard to
> unify in a single application (I assume OWL2 is not the final KR
> language).
> 
> The power of the semantic web is a stack with a single mandatory
> serialisation to a simple -but powerful- data-model. On top of that
> model we created a stack of languages with increasing semantic
> expressivity using the push-down mechanism.
> 
> The semantic extensions do not seem to justify breaking this stack.
> I think the task of OWL2 is to provide an extension to the semantic
> interpretation of the triple model of OWL1, possibly fixing some OWL1
> mistakes at the same time.  This working group should NOT be about the
> serialisation.
> 
> 	Regards --- Jan
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>