Request for explicit URI's for language profiles

We warmly support the introduction of language profiles, and we think
they are on the whole well chosen. However, we find it unacceptable that
the only way to determine the language fragment of an ontology is to
... parse the entire ontology. This is clearly impractical.
An obvious usage scenario is that
(1) I'm looking for ontologies in a particular application domain
(2) I can only tolerate ontologies in/up-to a particular profile
    (eg. because of limitations of my processing power)
Doing (1) can be done by something simple like treating all candidates as
text documents and look for relevant keywords, but for (2) .... I
must parse all candidate ontologies to see if they satisfy point (2).
(not nice, when the the OpenCyc ontology is one of my candidates...)
And what's worse, everybody has to do this again, because there is no
standardised way of expressing my findings anywhere. Why not choose the
obvious option to introduce a designated AnnotationAssertion, somewhere
in the header of the ontology document, to state the (minimal) language
profile of the content, by way of a designated URI for each language
profile. Of course there is no guarantee of
correctness for those annotations, but neither is there for any other
statement that an ontology makes.
We find the entire discussion on issue 111
<http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/tracker/issues/111> and its outcome
unconvincing and strongly urge to reconsider.

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 23:59:30 UTC