RE: NAME: SWOL versus WOL

OWL is excellent.

One man's opinion: Let's go for that.


Cheers

Ziv 

>-----Original Message-----
>From: tim finin [mailto:finin@cs.umbc.edu]
>Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2001 5:33 PM
>To: WOL
>Subject: Re: NAME: SWOL versus WOL
>
>
>Jim Hendler wrote:
>> ...
>> WOW-G - I thought we had pretty much reached consensus on WOL but
>> Dieter is right that Peter has been using SWOL and some other folks
>> are imitating that.  I think the consensus had focused more on WOL --
>> if others disagree, please let me know - I have been using WOL on
>> Coordination Group email, and haven't heard any problems with that.
>> We do need to reach consensus on this soon (and also start working on
>> a Logo - Dieter is right about that as well)
>
>I prefer the three letter WOL to the longer SWOL.  How about OWL
>as a variation.  The words would be the same (Ontology Web Language)
>but it has several advantages: (1) it has just one obvious 
>pronunciation
>which is easy on the ear; (2) it opens up great opportunities 
>for logos;
>(3) owls are associated with wisdom; (4) it has an interesting 
>back story.
>OWL has probably been used for many computer languages and 
>projects (see
>below), but I don't think that is a show stopper.  
>
>The back story:  Bill Martin was an active member of the MIT AI lab in
>the 60's, completing a PhD in 1967.  He was subsequently hired as an
>assistant professor at MIT and mentored many other early AI 
>people until
>his untimely death in the mid 70's.  One of the last big projects he 
>led was one to develop OWL, which stood for "One World 
>Language".  I can't
>find any links to info about it on the web, but I clearly 
>remember the idea,
>which at the time I thought ridiculously ambitions. OWL was a 
>simple KR language
>(based on semantic networks and frames, I think) intended to be
>an ontology of concepts which could be used to encode the 
>meaning of almost any
>natural language text.  It was like Roger Shank's Conceptual 
>Dependency, but
>instead of having dozens of concepts (ptrans, atrans, etc.), 
>it had thousands.  
>It also borrowed from work on linguistic case frames, but instead of 
>envisioning a handful of cases (subject, object, instrument, time), 
>it proposed hundreds.  OWL is arguably the first articulation 
>of a project
>to develop a KR language and associated ontology which was 
>intended to be
>a universal language for encoding meaning for computers.
>
>

Received on Thursday, 27 December 2001 12:33:09 UTC