Schism in the Semantic Web community.

I am currently having a look at new features available in OWL2 (thanks
for property chains :).
But I am quite frustrated to see that only OWLAPI handles OWL2 at the moment.
No short-term plan for Jena to support it.
No idea if Swoop or Protege3-OWL will ever be upgraded to support it.

OWLAPI does not manage semantic web at the statement level.
Jena was one of the few libraries to be both statement-based and concept-based.
Basically, i would say that Jena was the only API to glue the RDF
world and the OWL world together.
And because of that, it had been adopted by developpers as a
"one-size-fits-all" library.
And by RDF database vendors as their API for their RDF storage system.

This makes me wonder:
What will happen in the next future?
Will we see a schism between RDF tools, and OWL tools?
Virtuoso vs OwlGres?

I think it is good that the Semantic Web has always keeped that
internal competition between statements
and boxes. But if tools support is splitted, then what? Two
communities? Mass storage vs inference? A crucial
tools choice to make in any IT project? Then we are back in the vendor
lock-in nightmare.

Well, this is quite a rough reflexion.
Please comment.

Received on Friday, 9 January 2009 13:25:08 UTC