Re: QA Review of owl-semantics

Dear Sandro,

Thank you very much for this detailed answer.

At 12:33 -0400 2003-07-03, Sandro Hawke wrote:
>Guidelines" [4] before your deadline.  Each point below, addressing
>your comments on our spec is in a sense a comment on your spec.  We

That's definitely good. We plan to have a long period for the Ops and 
Spec Guidelines to test their implementations with the WG and so to 
know how to address some issues. The QA Framework will be effective 
only with the participation of every people implied in the WG life 
and specification editing.

>1. We have decided to publish our specification in the form of several
>    documents which are expected to have somewhat different audiences.
>    You have reviewed only one of the six and so missed most of the
>    (informative) background and explanatory material, as well as the
>    (normative) test suite and conformance section.   S&AS [3], the

not exactly. I read the others but didn't comment on it, because I 
was short on time. But I will explain how my comments relate to each 
parts.

>    However, your comments suggested to us that the overall picture of
>    the OWL documents was not sufficiently obvious. The WG therefore
>    decided to include in all OWL recommendation-track documents both
>    (1) a statement that the document is one part of a set of
>    documents, and (2) a prominent reference to the Document Roadmap in
>    "OWL Overview" [5].

OK. I agree with your answer, except for a detail.

	http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/#s1.1
In this part of OWL Web Ontology Language  Overview, you do not make 
references to the Tests Spec which contains the tests very useful and 
also the Conformance section.

Maybe I have missed something, but I tried to reach the "Test spec" 
from the different specs and I was unable to find them, which is bad 
because it's not very helpful for developers and diminishes the 
importance of the work of Jeremy Connell, who has given a lot of 
himself inside this work.

The way I see it (not mandatory) it's a kind of Master documents 
which articulates the different section (spec) of your ontology 
framework. So in each spec you could refer to this master document. 
"OWL Web Ontology Language
Overview" seems to be the right place for that, though I would move 
the conformance section from the Test Spec to the  Overview one.

I tried to think as a user who's navigating through the specs and 
wants to access all the information.

>    We believe many checkpoints not met by S&AS alone are fully met by
>    the OWL specification as a whole.  These include (in the order
>    given by your review) 1.1, 2.2, 3.4, 3.5, 10.1, 13.1, 1.4, 3.1,
>    13.4, 14.1, 14.2, and 2.3.  Most of these are addressed in OWL Test
>    Cases [6].  The remaining checkpoints on which you noted
>    non-conformance are discussed below.

	Granted	Spec as a whole if the Overview is really the 
entrance to the OWL framework.

	1.1 yes
	2.2 yes
	3.4 yes
	3.5 yes
	10.1 yes
	13.1 yes
	13.4 NO. see my point above... it's very difficult to find the test
		Case and conformance document
	14.1 is a bit tricky. Test Assertions are not test cases.
		I'm still not sure about it.

		Maybe the QA WG can give an opinion on that.

	14.2 conditional to 14.1
	2.3  yes

So you see in fact it's not so difficult. The QA Framework seems 
hard, but it's just a very modular way of applying it to your spec.

All my yes are conditional to the Granted comment before.

>
>2. Checkpoint 9.1 ("Indicate if the specification is extensible.").
>    We believe the goals of this checkpoint [11] have been satisfied,
>    although we offer no simple yes/no answer or claims for the related
>    section 9 checkpoints. As you know, OWL is constructed using RDF
>    and XML, so it inherits many of their extensibility features.  For
>    instance, we demonstrate RDF extensibility by showing how OWL terms
>    can be seen as an extension of RDFS terms [7], and we explain how
>    XML Datatype extensibility affects OWL [8] [9].  At the same time,
>    OWL Lite and DL have strict limits on what they contain, as
>    detailed in the conformance limits [10].  Among these and related
>    parts of our specification we believe we have guided the markets
>    around OWL sufficiently well at this time.

	ok
	For example XHTML Modularization has an extension mechanism.
	http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xhtml-modularization-20010410/introduction.html#s_intro_whatismod
	They describe how you can extend.
	They define the notion of validity and Hybrid document types.

	For XSLT 2.0, you have a whole chapter dedicated to it.
	http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/#extension
	When we say extensions are bad, it's because it can lead to 
not interoperable technologies, but the nature of the web for 
certains technologies like OWL is in part the extensibility.
	So it's what we recognize this fact but encourage people to 
define it, under which conditions, and to ask other people to declare 
what they do, when they create an extension.

>3. Checkpoint 13.2 ("Distinguish normative and informative text").
>    The Working Group feels that the style for making this distinction
>    is a matter of editorial discretion, best done with an
>    understanding of a particular document and its audience.  The
>    editors of S&AS have agreed to discuss this directly with you.

ok waiting for the email. Fine by me.  I have seen it was done in one 
of your documents.

>I hope you find these explanations and comments useful.  I would be
>happy to continue discussion of your specifications.  Meanwhile, Karl,
>please let me know (with a cc: public-webont-comments@w3.org) whether
>this reply is satisfactory in addressing your group concerns about our
>specifications.


Thank you very much Sandro and all the people of the OWL WG. It's 
very useful. I hope it will be beneficial as it is for the QA WG.



>[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webont-comments/2003Apr/0064
>and http://www.w3.org/QA/2003/04/QA-Rev-owl-semantics-all
>[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webont-comments/2003May/0002
>[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-owl-semantics-20030331/
>[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-qaframe-spec-20030210/
>[5] http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/#s1.1
>[6] http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-test/
>[7] http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/#appB
>[8] http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-semantics/direct.html#3.1
>[9] http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-semantics/rdfs.html#5.2
>[10] http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-test/#docConformance
>[11] http://www.w3.org/TR/qaframe-spec/#Gd-extensions


-- 
Karl Dubost / W3C - Conformance Manager
           http://www.w3.org/QA/

      --- Be Strict To Be Cool! ---

Received on Tuesday, 8 July 2003 14:41:20 UTC