Re: Clarification request: OWL vs. RDF Schemas

At 15:55 +0100 2/12/03, Ivan Herman wrote:
>Reviewing the OWL Guide version 1.0,
>http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-owl-guide-20030210/:
>
>As a reader NOT participating in the working group (ie, not being part
>of all the intricate discussions), the current document is very
>confusing on the issue on how OWL and RDFS relate. The impression one
>gets when reading the document is that OWL picks bits and pieces of the
>RDFS document for its own purposes (rdfs:subClassOf, rdfs:label, etc),
>but deliberately ignores or deprecates, for example, rdfs:Property or
>rdfs:Class by introducing owl:Class, owl:ObjectProperty, and owl:Thing,
>etc. I presume there is a clear model on how these notions relate to one
>another, but I am afraid the current document creates real confusion to
>the community. Adding a separate chapter describing the 'onion model' of
>concentric possibilities offered by RDFS and the various OWL dialect
>would be beneficial.
>
>Ivan
>
>--
>
>Ivan Herman
>W3C Head of Offices
>C/o W3C Benelux Office at CWI, Kruislaan 413, 1098SJ Amsterdam, The
>Netherlands
>tel: +31-20-5924163; mobile: +31-641044153;
>URL: http://www.w3.org/People/all?pictures=yes#ivan

Ivan, thanks for your comment.  This is something we are actively 
working on now.  You might look at the Overview document (formerly 
called features) which answers some of that, and Reference which has 
a more comprehensive discussion of the OWL sublanguages -- we haven't 
yet stabilized our discussion of the relation with RDF(S), in part 
because we were waiting for their documents to reach a stable state - 
since they've gone to LC, we've been able to make some progress on 
this
  - Jim Hendler

-- 
Professor James Hendler				  hendler@cs.umd.edu
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	  240-731-3822 (Cell)
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler

Received on Wednesday, 12 February 2003 11:56:40 UTC