RE: Review of Guide

Thanks Jeff.

Responses below. 

- Mike

> At the F2F, I was actioned to review this document. I think it is almost
> ready, but there are still a few things that need to be fixed. Some of
> these are simple typos, others a little more substantial, but I think
> still easily fixed.
> 
> 1) We need an example of an OWL ontology that consists soley of
> instances. These will be the most numerous OWL "ontologies" on the Web,
> so we should at least show people how to do them. I think the easiest
> way to do this is to take all of the Wine and Winery instances from
> wine.owl and move them into a third file called winelist.owl. Then in
> section 3.2.1 (Defining Individuals), we can add something like
> "Ontologies that describe classes and properties may include
> descriptions of individuals. However, many ontologies will consist soley
> of individuals. For example, the wine list of a particular restaurant
> may be represented as an ontology that describes all of the wines
> available. In order to include the descriptions of the various styles of
> wine, this ontology must import wine.owl. An example of this is
> presented in winelist.owl."

This was a great suggestion that Mike Dean made earlier, that I meant
to follow up on and have not had time for.  I can't devote much more time
to the Guide for the rest of this month, so this change currently has
low priortiy.

> 2) Are the classes WineYear and VintageYear supposed to be the same
> thing? In wine.owl, the VintageYear class is never defined, and the
> WineYear class is only used to introduce Year1998. 

Yep.  Replaced occurences of WineYear by VintageYear. Year1998 is
there as an example.

> 3) I don't think the Section 3.5 Ontology Versioning belongs under basic
> definitions. I think it should be a section 6 that comes after complex
> classes, and that Usage Examples should become section 7. The reason is
> I think the guide reader will be interested in ontology mapping and
> complex classes, before he or she is interested in ontology versioning.

Hmm.  I think you are right.  Will read more carefully to check
dependencies.

> 4) Replace the first paragraph in the Ontology Versioning section
> (currently 3.5) with the following two paragraphs. (and note the
> correction of owl:Ontology capitalization in the 2nd parahraph)
> 
> Ontologies are like software, they will be maintained and thus will
> change over time. However, once an ontology has been released, other
> documents on the Web may come to depend on it (for example, by importing
> it), and any changes may have significant impacts on these dependent
> documents. Therefore, when a deployed ontology needs to be updated, the
> original file should not be modified. Instead, the changes should be
> made to a copy of the ontology which is assigned a different URL. OWL
> provides some basic properties to describe relationships between
> different versions of an ontology. Note that these properties need not
> be used when changing an ontology that is in its design phase and has
> not been relased yet. In those situations, there are either no
> dependencies or the dependencies can be managed internally, so standard
> document or software version management techniques may be used.

Seems a little long.  Will come up with revised wording.
 
> Within a owl:Ontology element (discussed above), it is possible to link
> to a previous version of the ontology being defined. owl:priorVersion is
> a standard tag intended to provide this link, and can be used to track
> the version history of an ontology.

DONE

> 5) Sect. 4: Ontology mapping, para 3:
> Tool support will almost certainly be required consistency. 
> 
> should this be:
> 
> Tool support will almost certainly be required to maintain consistency. 

DONE

> 6) Sect. 4.2 sameIndividualAssameAs
> The statement that sameAs "is available mainly for backwards
> compatibility" is a little odd. Backwards compatible with what? This is
> the first version of owl, and I don't think DAML+OIL had sameAs. I think
> it would be better to say "sameAs is a less verbose synonym of
> sameIndividualAs."

Deleted "and is available mainly for backwards compatibility."

> 7) Sect. 4.3, AllDifferent example
> change rdf:parsetType to rdf:parseType (remove extra 't')

DONE

Received on Wednesday, 22 January 2003 11:03:29 UTC