Confusing usage of the name "OWL2"

Many documents seem to suggest that the term "OWL2" is only applied to
the OWL2 DL fragment. For example, the "Direct Semantics" document says:

 > This document provides the direct model-theoretic semantics for OWL 2
and
 > Since OWL 2 is an extension of OWL DL ....

But in common usage, as well as in the OWL1 REC documents, the term "OWL"
stands for the entire set of 3 sublanguages. E.g.

 > OWL has three increasingly-expressive sublanguages: OWL Lite, OWL DL,
 > and OWL Full.
(OWL1 Overview).

The term OWL2 suggests that it is a successor of OWL, whereas in fact it
is only a successor of OWL DL.

Hence, we strongly insist that the names are adjusted to be in
line with common practice.
Thus, we would have OWL2 DL, OWL2 Full, OWL2 RL, and also OWL2 Full.

Notice that the conformance document <http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-test/>
properly speaks about OWL2 DL, OWL2 Full etc.
We are asking for this to be done consistently across the entire
document set, to avoid widespread confusion.

Frank van Harmelen,
and many members of the Semantic Web Group at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

-- 
Frank.van.Harmelen@cs.vu.nl		http://www.cs.vu.nl/~frankh
Working on the Large Knowledge Collider	http://www.LarKC.eu

Received on Friday, 23 January 2009 23:58:50 UTC