Re: S&AS review: general remarks

From: herman.ter.horst@philips.com
Subject: Re: S&AS review: general remarks
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 15:13:49 +0100

> >[...]
> >
> >> The S&AS document to be reviewed has no Section 4.3 on
> >> RDF descriptions of OWL DL and OWL Lite.
> >> I believe that if WebOnt decides to go to last call without this
> >> section in the S&AS document, then the clear intention should be 
> >> confirmed to add this section later to the document.
> >> Strictly speaking, as I noted earlier, the S&AS document without
> >> Section 4.3 is not consistent with the RDF Semantics spec,
> >> which requires that:
> >> >Specifications of such syntactically restricted semantic 
> >> >extensions MUST include a specification of their syntactic 
> >> >conditions which are sufficient to enable software to 
> >> >distinguish unambiguously those RDF graphs to which the 
> >> >extended semantic conditions apply. 
> >
> >I do not believe that this is necessary for OWL. 
> 
> >First, OWL Full includes
> >all RDF graphs, so it is not a syntactically-restricted semantic
> >extension. 
> 
> True.
> 
> >Second, OWL DL does have a specification that I believe meets
> >the requirements.
> 
> This has been extensively discussed.
> The normative specification does not provide direct "syntactic
> conditions" as mentioned above.
> In order to decide whether an RDF graph is OWL DL or OWL Lite
> by means of the normative specification, a software system
> would need to use the mapping rules backwards, which would
> be a very cumbersome process, if at all possible unambiguously.

Whether it is cumbersome or not is not the issue.  The document does
include a means for determining whether an RDF graph is in OWL DL or OWL
Lite.

peter

Received on Thursday, 27 March 2003 09:23:14 UTC