- From: Jim Hendler <hendler@cs.umd.edu>
- Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2002 10:38:44 -0500
- To: Christopher Welty <welty@us.ibm.com>
- Cc: webont <www-webont-wg@w3.org>
>Jim, > >If by, "I believe strongly that this is not a critical issue of language >design, it's simply a suggestion we develop consistent terms so we >get our message out," you mean that you just want a term that we will >agree to employ in our human interchange, and not something in the OWL >language, then that's fine, make something up and we'll add it to the >Guide. that's all I was asking for >It appeared from the discussion that Jeff and you wanted something more >formal, that required an adjustment to the meaning of the owl:ontology >tag. I didn't, I can't speak for Jeff as to whether he did or not. >In the Guide, Mike and I chose to employ "ontology" (not the tag, but the >natural language term) to refer to what we "traditionally" (it's a short >tradition) call ontology in Computer Science, and "knowledge base" >to refer to a mixture of ontology and instance data. We did not draw >the distinction you want there, but if I understand you >correctly, the Guide is right place to talk about this. I think that "knowledge base," although a good descriptor of these documents, may not go over well with some of our target audience. In some of the RDF docs these are called "RDF Databases" which also seems problematic (i.e. "OWL databases" seems misleading.) I liked something like "Owl data documents" but that seems to be what got this debate going in the first place. So I'm not sure, but "Owl data XXX" for some XXX seems to me to be the one that would best fit audience expectations -JH -- 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 Monday, 11 November 2002 10:38:56 UTC