WebOnt Request for Candidate Recommendation Status and Implementation Report

DRAFT $Revision: 1.21 $ of $Date: 2003/07/17 21:41:19 $ by $Author: connolly $
Dan Connolly

Dear W3C Director,

WhereAs

you chartered us to develop an ontology language, with support of the W3C Membership
we have elaborated on the value of this work to the community by way of use cases and derived design requirements
we have developed specification, test materials, and supplementary documentation for OWL that meet our charter and requirements
this specification of other materials has received wide review, within the Working Group and the community, and we have addressed the issues raised in this review with consensus on all but 2.
we have implementation experience to validate the design

the Web Ontology Working group [probably will decide, 24 July] have decided@@link to request that you advance this specification to W3C Candidate Recommendation and call for implementation.

Titles, Abstracts, and Proposed Status

Overview
Guide
Reference
Semantics
Test
Requirements

@@full titles etc. (currently enumerated on WG home)

Summary of Review

Starting in November 2001, review followed the scope section of the Working Group charter:

The Working Group shall start by evaluating the technical solutions proposed in the DAML+OIL draft. If in this process the Working Group finds solutions that are agreed to be improvements over solutions suggested by DAML+OIL, those improved solutions should be used.

The first Working Drafts were released in July 2002 for review by the community, including groups with identified dependencies. About 50 issues were identified by the Working Group.

Dependencies were discharged as follows:

the W3C RDF Core Working Group reviewed Refence, semantics, and test; comments they sent were addressed to their satisfaction (@@evidence). (@@note our dependency on them isn't completely discharged; see exit criteria below.)
The DARPA DAML project endorsed the work (Murray A. Burke 8 May 2003).
A report on OMG relationship, 5 Aug 2002 by Evan Wallace, indicated the suitability of OWL in some OMG work. (@@more details? close the loop again?) Current OMG Specification
Ontology Definition Metamodel RFP (document ad/2003-03-40) This RFP seeks a specification of a MOF2 Metamodel, UML2 profile, and any additional information needed to support: 7 Development of ontologies using UML modeling tools 7 Implementation of ontologies in the W3C Web Ontology Language OWL. 7 Forward and reverse engineering for ontologies.

The Working Group responded to comments on a best-effort basis throughout the review, and [@@not yet!] formally addressed all last call-comments (@@integrate jim's work on disposition and summary of comments, another view). We achieved consensus on all but two issues:

5.6 daml:imports as magic syntax: @@explain why The Director should confirm the WG's decision despite the outstanding objection from Hendler/MIND and from @@Connolly/W3C
5.26-OWL DL Sytntax: @@explain why The Director should confirm the WG's decision despite the outstanding objection from Carroll/HP

Implementation Experience

The following implementation experience leads us to believe that once the exit criteria below are met, we will have sufficient implementation experience to validate the design and merit widespread deployment.

Demos/Portals (which use cases are deployed? which requirements are shown?)
- mindswap (Hendler 6May)
- ISX Portal
- AKT Portal
- Guus' art/architecture
- UMBC demos (Finin 7May)
- BioPax - A Data Exchange Format for Biological Pathways
- W3C tech reports: cwm etc. (@@review Dom's presentation in Budapest)
- travel tools? RDF calendar? what OWL use there?
- foaf co-depiction... does it use OWL for "smushing"? if so, we can count it against our "multimedia collections" use case
Reasoners (goal: 2 complete OWL Lite, 2 useful OWL DL, 2 useful OWL Full)
- Jena/HP (Reynolds/HP 7 May)
- FaCT complete OWL Lite (bechofer)
- Cerebra from Network Inference (mostly done?)
- cwm (otter?) useful OWL Full (complete OWL feather?)(WebSite)
- Euler useful OWL Full
- FaCT (Racer?) WonderWeb project
- Jan's SWI-prolog Owl library
- UMBC: Fowl to do OWL Lite ~ June 2003 (Finin 7May)
parser/validators (how many conforming syntax checkers?)
- owl species validator/parser, bechofer/volz (almost conforming)
- Jena: almost conforming ( Carroll/HP 6 May )
- BBN OWL Validator
- Redland?
- RIC Instance Creator
Editors (how many produce conforming OWL documents? OWL DL? OWL Lite?)
- OilEd (not yet updated to OWL)
- Protege (in Progress)(@@update)
- Construct from Network Inference Complete OWL-DL (White 15Jul)
- SMORE (@@what does it do?)
- cwm .n3 -> .rdf
Ontologies (how many conforming OWL documents? OWL DL? OWL Lite?)
- 209 DAML ontologies can be converted by OwlConverter, mostly into OWL Full
- NCI(Paper)@@
- UMBC: several ontologies (Finin 7May)
API
- OWL API (bechover/volz 7 May)
- Jena (Reynolds/HP 7 May)
- Cerebra from network inference

Features and Implementations
Implementation	test count	OWL Lite Equality and Inequality	Property Characteristics	Property Type Restrictions	OWL Lite Restricted Cardinality	OWL Lite Datatypes	OWL Full Datatypes	Cardinality	Boolean combinations	other class constructors	imports
Euler De Roo 11 Jul	51 / 234
Cerebra White 15 Jul		Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	no	partial	Yes	Yes	Yes
PELLET Hendler 17 Jul	passes 79 approved tests and 21 proposed tests. more details in PELLET status
OWLLisaKB Hendler 17 Jul	7. details: OWLLisaKB: Passed test cases
Vampire Horrocks 17 Jul		Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	no	no	Yes	Yes	Yes	no
FaCT Horrocks 12 May		partial	Yes	Yes	Yes	no	no	Yes	Yes	partial	no

OWL Lite Equality and Inequality: owl:AllDifferent, owl:sameClassAs, owl:differentFrom, owl:distinctMembers, owl:samePropertyAs, @@sameAs, 7.2.4. EquivalentTo )
Property Characteristics: owl:FunctionalProperty, owl:InverseFunctionalProperty, owl:SymmetricProperty, owl:TransitiveProperty, owl:inverseOf
Property Type Restrictions: (owl:allValuesFrom, owl:someValuesFrom)
OWL Lite Restricted Cardinality: @@do we have tests for this?
OWL Lite Datatypes: @@no test section for this?
OWL Full Datatypes: (7.2.5. Uniform treatment of literal data values)
Cardinality: owl:cardinality, owl:maxCardinality, @@no tests for minCardinality?
Boolean combinations: unionOf, complementOf, and intersectionOf
other class constructors: owl:disjointWith, owl:Nothing, owl:oneOf
imports: owl:imports


From:	Charles White <Charles.White@networkinference.com>
To: 	Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
Date: 	Tue, 15 Jul 2003 06:40:23 +0100

Candidate Recommendation Exit Criteria

integrate any changes to RDF Core specs
sufficient implementations pass sufficient tests e.g. 2 complete OWL Lite consistency checkers (i.e. 2 which pass all OWL Lite consistency and inconsistency tests and moreover claim logical completeness) at least one reasoner passes every test that is not an extra credit test two reasoners implementing (different) substantial subsets of OWL DL two owl syntax checkers passing all tests

Endorsements

@@WG membership as of decision to request advancement

"yes, we love OWL. Use it all the time. Love the tools. Can't live without it." -- Acme Yes Men.