Re: Modeling issues and guidelines?

On Tue, 2003-07-22 at 04:14, Bernard Vatant wrote:
> Find below the cc of a message I've sent today to the Protégé mailing list.
> Not to get answers on this forum, of course (although I would welcome any
> knowledgeable answer privately), but sending it, I was wondering if it is
> intended by WebOnt group to develop and somehow annex to OWL specification
> some informative document(s) about that kind of modeling issues, and/or
> guidelines or references to best practices, modeling in OWL-FAQ, whatever
> ...

Let me see if I can put aside the part of me that is deep
into end-game mode, trying madly to cross things off the TODO list
of this group, and respond constructively to your offer to
help get this technology deployed...

As you observe...

> I know this is not explicitly in the charter nor deliverables. It might
> even be contradictory with the requirement "The products of the WebONT
> group should not presuppose any particular approach to either ontology
> design or ontology use."

I'm not inclined to extend the work of this group into review
of tutorial materials (beyond the OWL Guide WD).

Meanwhile, in the short term, there are at least these mechanisms
in place:

  - you can help answer questions that come up in www-rdf-logic
  - you can write tutorial material and call for review (and/or
    collaborators) in www-rdf-logic, www-rdf-interest, etc. e.g.

  Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 11:00:03 -0500
  From: "Roger L. Costello" <costello@mitre.org>
  To: www-rdf-logic@w3.org
  Subject: ANN: OWL Tutorial
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-logic/2003Mar/0190.html

  - you can collaborate on patterns of best practice and frequently
    asked questions in the ESW Wiki; e.g.
    http://esw.w3.org/topic/ThingsVersusTheirNames
not to mention
    http://esw.w3.org/topic/TopicMaps

Beyond those existing mechansism and fora,
you're also welcome to discuss with Eric Miller, Semantic Web
Activity Lead, your interest in, for example, a W3C Interest Group on
best practices and such. Other folks have expressed interest;
e.g. at the Cambridge tech plenary last March:

13:30 - 15:00 First afternoon session
        Best Practices / Education and Outreach - Eric Miller 
              * logs: 18:36:24
              * Kathy MacDougal, Sun's SWoRDFish
              * Guus Schrieber, Some thoughts on SW Best Practices
              * Liddy Neville, Additional thoughts
  -- http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/meetings/tech-200303/

> OTOH the specification have made a considerable, and I would say, unusual,
> effort of pedagogy. I figure this is about to trigger ontology development
> and maintenance to spread outside the original core community of AI and
> Knowlegde Engineers, and become mainstream technology. From what I see
> around, this trend is already there. Based on experience in helping
> customers in Topic Maps modeling - which implies mastering of a handful of
> not so hard to grasp concepts - I'm concerned with the perspective of a
> rapidly growing demand of modeling support from OWL potential users, and
> some good tutorial literature about it would be indeed very important to
> face this demand and help adopters to avoid syntactic hacking and really
> use OWL in a way that "makes sense".


> I would of course gladly volunteer to contribute to such an effort by any
> means that this group would find relevant.
> 
> Bernard
> 
[...]

-- 
Dan

Received on Wednesday, 23 July 2003 19:45:03 UTC