Re: Comments on draft "Feature Synopsis for OWL Lite and OWL"

Jacco,

Thanks for your very useful comments.
The gist of your comment is:

> While I think the feature synopsis document is a good addition
> to the more formal documents, I think the synopsis good do better
> in making explicit to what class(es) of applications these features
> are aimed at.
> [...]
> This applies in particular to OWL Lite.

I agree. It's a common problem with documents like these that the authors 
have internalised so many of these arguments that they (read: we:-) forget to 
write them down for the benefit of the readers.

Fortunately, you already suggest two concrete ways of improving the document

> Maybe it could reach out
> to the "non-AI crowd" more, and explicitly discuss the OWL Lite features
> in the terms familair to users dealing with metadata (e.g. "the digital
> library crowd"), UML designers (e.g. "the OO crowd"), semantic modelers
> (in the database sense of the term, so those doing (extended) Entity
> Relationship modeling etc).

One option that I will explore is to link the definition of OWL Lite with the 
use case from our requirements document (see [1]) to achieve what you 
suggest.

You suggested also:

> Explicit statements like "these and these features are not part of RDFS,
> but you need them to represent features found in most ER/UML diagrams"
> would help.  An example of a typical ER-diagram and a typical UML
> diagram with their OWL-lite serialization would also help.

Work is already ongoing within the WG to use UML as a presentation syntax for 
OWL (see e.g. [2]). When this has matured, we should add this indeed as 
motivation, as you suggest.

Thanks again for your useful suggestions,

Frank.van.Harmelen@cs.vu.nl              http://www.cs.vu.nl/~frankh
Department of AI, Faculty of Sciences,  Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
de Boelelaan 1081a, 1081HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
tel (+31)-20-444 7731/7700 fax (+31)-84-221 4294

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/webont-req/#section-use-cases
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2002May/0196.html

Received on Thursday, 8 August 2002 10:26:17 UTC