Re: Guide tests

At 10:03 AM +0100 10/7/03, Jeremy Carroll wrote:
>Jim:
>
>>  I think we should wait to see if these get passed - I'm not yet 
>>convinced that these are not passable
>
>
>Martin has indicated to me that he would be happy with a single 
>system that passes these tests. Other HP developers have heard 
>informally from other groups who seem to believe that the current DL 
>profile is implementable, which is part of the reason for our 
>surprise.
>
>I take the action to propose reclassifying these to be withdrawn, 
>for now at least.
>

at least on hold

>
>>  p.s. Even if these do prove to be too hard to prove consistent at 
>>the current time, I don't see how that would change the response to 
>>Merry -- proving things consistent is not the only reason to have 
>>OWL...
>>
>
>
>There are choices such as:
>- do what Martin suggests and redefine DL downwards to match 
>implementations. While this would require a second last call, we 
>could then go straight into PR without another CR. (Note: I do not 
>know whether HP would want this or not - I have heard arguments both 
>ways).
>- add sufficient health warnings to the guide (where 'sufficient' 
>would be a topic of debate) and reply again indicating that these 
>are the main defence against Martin's concerns about the 
>implementability of DL
>
>I would like to see test results from the heavyweights: Racer, Cerebra etc.


I still await an argument that proving large and complex ontologies 
consistent is the only reason d'etre for OWL - I've never believed 
that and continue not to.  Here's a thought - the NCI ontology was 
carefully crafted to be in OWL Lite, and passes various syntax 
checkers at the Lite level.  It also doesn't use any particularly 
complex OWL - however, I suspect proving it consistent would be hard 
for Lite implementations (because it contains about 17000 classes - 
so the problem is simply bulk, not complexity) - yet several groups I 
know about are using it routinely -- other examples include OpenCYC 
and our wine ontology -- so I would resist any non-editorial changes 
caused by a mistaken notion that consistent checking is more 
important than other kinds of inference on the Semantic Web...

-- 
Professor James Hendler				  hendler@cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  *** 240-277-3388 (Cell)
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler      *** NOTE CHANGED CELL NUMBER ***

Received on Tuesday, 7 October 2003 09:00:49 UTC