Re: QCRs - How much time are they worth?

I think we need to take the statement that some organizations are 
counting on a release of OWL in the near future very seriously.

I have also heard a statement that I believe that the release of OWL 
will be a major catalyst for market adoption.

I will be voting for whatever route we can find to push forward the 
quicker adoption of OWL.
My reading of the entire situation is that the best thing for that is to 
postpone QCR at the moment with some work on an idioms page.  I am 
willing to help with the idioms page.
(I had started that with DAML+OIL at 
http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm/webont/HowToDoIt/ )

I want to stress that I am not against qualified cardinality 
restrictions and I will put in work after the group ends if that would 
happen to make sure that people who need them have a proposal. (I 
personally will use them if i have them.)  I just want to get OWL out 
there.  

Deborah

Charles White wrote:

>WOWGers,
>
>I agree with the proposal here that we change the status of 3.2 to Postponed.
>I think we should get a specification released and then do a 1.1 version that contains QCRs and possibly other extensions. In all the messages, there does not seem to be enough agreement on what QCRs should look like and I feel that it is unlikely to come to a timely close. There are organizations that are counting on a release of OWL in the near future so that they can have something stable to point at. I think postponing and doing an idioms page is the best option.
>
>charles
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Jim Hendler [mailto:hendler@cs.umd.edu]
>Sent: 28 April 2003 05:16
>To: webont
>Subject: QCRs - How much time are they worth?
>
>
>
>WOWGers-
>
>Summary:  Adding QCRs to OWL is likely to add 3-4 MONTHS to the time 
>until we move OWL to PR.  Are they worth it?  What is an alternative?
>
>Details:
>
>It is clear that every proposal to date for QCRs would require more 
>than syntactic sugar.  Due to the nature of the graphs we have chosen 
>to use to date, we would either need to add new constructors (like 
>the Q constructors in D+O), make changes to our treatment of current 
>constructs (like changing all restrictions to be qualified in some 
>sense), or invent some new syntax that requires reworking of 
>normative sections of our documents (such as Ian's most recent 
>proposal).  While none of these require major semantic change, they 
>all require changes at the syntactic and graph level that go beyond 
>what could comfortably be defended as "editorial" change.
>
>We then add to this fact that, although there have been 
>implementations of QCRs, none have been doen in the correct syntax 
>(as we don't yet have one).  Worse, going over the list of D+O tools 
>that I had hoped to cite in our implementation report, it is unclear 
>any of them actually handle the Q-constructs in any real sense.  The 
>validator allows them, but doesn't check for violations, the 
>"instance" based tools appear to check cardinality constraints in 
>some form (for example RIC enforces cardinality, but not qualified 
>cardinality), and their is no evidence in the toolset on the D+O page 
>that a reasoner that handles the qualified cardinality constraints 
>(including instances) exists.
>
>As such, we would almost definitely need to do the following:
>  Upon end of current LC, we would need to make changes for QCRs and 
>do a second LC  --  If nothing else tests for QCRs would have to be 
>added to the Test document.  It would be a mistake to release Test as 
>LC now if we know it is going to change with a new feature that 
>requires new tests and changes old ones.
>  This means at end of current LC we add a second LC period of a 
>minimum of 4 weeks.
>  On close of that LC, we would have to move to CR (not PR).  While we 
>might be able to get away with a 4 week CR period, a longer CR period 
>is typical, and there would be time between the second LC and the new 
>CR.
>  Thus, I believe our schedule would need to be
>
>May 9, close current LC.
>June 1, new LC begins
>end of June - new LC ends
>mid-July (earliest) - CR begins
>end-August - CR ends   (note, this is optimistic as getting much done 
>in Aug is hard)
>
>This means rather than having OWL at Rec by end of summer, we'd be 
>looking at having it at Proposed Recommendation by September.
>
>
>Alternative:
>
>   Since OWL DL is SHIQ (maybe SHIOQ) we know QCRs are in our current 
>semantic coverage.  This means that we should be able to develop an 
>idiom within our current language to handle them (even if it means 
>creating extra classes).  We have talked often about the need for an 
>idioms page.  We could create that page, and make a recommendation 
>for how to handle QCRs be one of the entries on that page.  We could 
>have Guide, Ref and Features (non-normative documents) point at that 
>page and have discussion of a recommendation for QCRs.
>  Note that this is consistent with past practice of our WG, within 
>W3C process, and would not add any delay to OWL release.
>
>Proposal:
>  I propose we change the closing status of issue 3.2 to POSTPONED. 
>We create the idioms page and a discussion of QCRs go there.  A 
>pointer to that discussion is added to the issues page, and can be 
>referred to in our non-normative documents if desired.
>
>
>
>
>  
>

Received on Thursday, 1 May 2003 14:11:32 UTC