RE: OWL 1.1 docs (was RE: [ANN] New OWL Working Group Chartered)

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Bijan Parsia [mailto:bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk] 
>Sent: Friday, September 14, 2007 9:59 AM
>To: Michael Schneider
>Cc: SW-forum Web
>Subject: Re: OWL 1.1 docs (was RE: [ANN] New OWL Working Group 
>Chartered)
>
>[trimmed owl dev]
>On Sep 14, 2007, at 8:39 AM, Michael Schneider wrote:
>
>> Bijan Parsia wrote:
>>
>>> If a RDFED or RDF 1.1 group wanted some infrastructure, 
>that would be
>>> cool too.
>>
>> RDF 1.1? Did I miss something?
>
>You missed the indefinite article before RDFED. This is indicating  
>that if some such group came into existence, then webont.org would  
>happily provide some infrastructure.

Ok!

>In point of fact, I think an RDFnext is a good idea, 

Such an approach at least worked well for OWL until now. A few competent
people just started to work on a draft, not constrained by any formalistic
processes, providing to the community a set of concrete new features to be
discussed. Others are discussing the different proposed features
controversaly, again others include experimental support for these features
into their tools, so that again others are able to play around with it and
report back problems. The now started WG will find a good foundation for
their work from the beginning. Certainly, a few things will yet change or
even be dropped, but other proposed features seam already to be widely
accepted, and are even already in use, due to the rapid incorporation into
existing tools and reasoners.

>even if it  
>*only* did 1.1 stuff (better syntax, better datatype support,  
>standardizing the de facto bnode semantics, and a few other things).
>However, getting consensus on RDF changes is even harder, as far as I  
>can tell, then on OWL changes. There are just more players involved.

Oh, does this mean that there would be no place for heated discussions about
Reification/NamedGraphs/Quads/K-Tuples? ;-)

But, seriously, I like the idea of rapid incremental updates (i.e. "1.1") to
RDF. If there are features or changes, for which there is already common
consensus in the community, and which happen to be only "conservative"
changes, then it is probably better to put these feature into a standard
soon, instead of waiting another five years or more for a "big next
revision". The longer one waits for such changes, the harder it will become
to introduce even slight changes into the standard, provided that RDF and
the SemanticWeb will (hopefully) become more and more "mainstream" within
the coming years.

>A good start to making progress is do to something like the OWLED  
>workshop series: Set up a meeting that is specifically designed to  
>gather feedback on a iteration of RDF. Make sure you have the  
>involvement of major users and implementors. Try to get a de facto  
>standard going. Gather high priority requirements from the community.  
>Etc.

Agreed.

>It's not an easy task. I'm personally interested but frankly have  
>*no* time or energy to spearhead such an effort. And it could be  
>easily *at least* two years before sufficient consensus was built  
>(one reason to target de facto standards as well as de jure ones).
>
>If one were looking for times/places to set a first such meeting, I'd  
>suggest ESWC or WWW 2008. ISWC is way far off and has a lot going on  
>already (e.g., OWLED and RR).
>
>Another possibility would be to form an XG on this. I'm a little wary  
>of XGs cause 1) I don't have a lot of experience with them and 2)  
>they feel a bit closed to me. YMMV.
>
>Cheers,
>Bijan.
>

Bye,
Michael

--
Dipl.-Inform. Michael Schneider
FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik Karlsruhe
Abtl. Information Process Engineering (IPE)
Tel  : +49-721-9654-726
Fax  : +49-721-9654-727
Email: Michael.Schneider@fzi.de
Web  : http://www.fzi.de/ipe/eng/mitarbeiter.php?id=555

FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik an der Universität Karlsruhe
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Received on Friday, 14 September 2007 10:37:56 UTC