- From: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>
- Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2009 10:04:46 +0000
- To: Jim Hendler <hendler@cs.rpi.edu>
- Cc: public-owl-comments@w3.org, "Ralph R. Swick" <swick@w3.org>, W3C OWL Working Group <public-owl-wg@w3.org>
This is a personal response. I am, of course, surprised and dismayed that you would experience my sentence as an insult. In the email conversation you had with us which clarified this feature of OWL, you wrote (in <http://www.w3.org/ mid/3D9CD8CA-8994-4703-93EF-2E0753B2BF8E@cs.rpi.edu>): """"However, given two of us who had PhDs in AI and long experience with DBs took a while to work through the semantics, and didn't get the idea of these examples without the emails from you folks, I do think documenting it will be important...""" When drafting the response, I considered whether your not getting these use cases was function of your expertise. It is not uncommon for people with a lot of background in an area to read things differently than people new to an area. Obviously, we don't want to optimize our documents for experts. In this case, however, it was clear that the clarification was helpful to all readers. I included the sentence about your expertise in order to indicate that we had taken *all* of your remarks into careful consideration. Clearly, I step wrongly there. There were those in the working group (e.g., Christine Golbreich) who were uneasy about that remark, but yielded to my judgment partly on the grounds that you and I have worked together for a long time and had a good relationship. You can see my reply to Christine wherein I argue against her on the grounds above: <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-wg/2009Jan/0203.html> (Scroll to the end.) In the discussion of your comment which led to working group approval of this comment: <http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/meeting/2009-02-04#JH1> You'll see: """Bijan Parsia: Jim was happy with the additional line to the document, that I sent to the mailing list""" Which was a reference to an email you sent privately to me in response to the following message: <http://www.w3.org/mid/ B0350B0D-2482-468D-84D7-71650CBBD524@cs.man.ac.uk> You wrote: """not cc'ed I have reason to believe that this would be accepted :-) (and I like the additional line you came up with, so hope you'll add it.) -JH""" Your email message contained the entirety of the draft response, including the offensive line. It was on the basis of this message from you that I assured the working group that you were fine with the response, in spite of some misgivings. If the working group is to blame for anything, it was for placing to much confidence in my judgement. I hope it is clear that there was no slight or insult intended and that the comment arose naturally from the discussion which included you and that it remained in the final message because of a confusion on my part and the working group's trust in me. I apologize both to you and the working group for the trouble caused, and to Christine for dismissing her concern. Cheers, Bijan.
Received on Thursday, 19 February 2009 10:01:18 UTC