- From: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>
- Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2009 13:41:44 +0000
- To: Alan Rector <rector@cs.man.ac.uk>
- Cc: public-owl-comments@w3.org
Dear Alan,
Thank you for your comment
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/
2008Dec/0000.html>
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/
2009Jan/0009.html>
on the OWL 2 Web Ontology Language last call drafts.
The working group has decided to make no change to OWL 2 in response
to your comment. While we appreciate the use cases raised in your
comment, we found that the specification and technical difficulties
of adding such a feature at this time outweigh the benefits it would
bring, esp. given the existence of various workarounds. For example:
* One could embed class expressions in literals, i.e., xsd:string
or XMLLiteral. While you point out that "strings rust", one could
introduce a named subtype of xsd:string that would allow tools, such
as Protege 4, to syntax check the expressions.
* One could introduce a named class for the expression. To avoid
cluttering the class hierarchy with these classes, one could either
annotate the axioms, or use a distinguished naming scheme, or make
them subclasses of a certain class.
* In OWL Full, this is available in certain forms. So one could
use OWL Full to guide an extension.
The main issue with such workarounds is, of course, interoperability.
However, we feel confident that reasonable interoperability could be
accomplished by your publishing details of the annotations (or naming
scheme, or subtype) and having your popular tools support it.
Please acknowledge receipt of this email to <mailto:public-owl-
comments@w3.org> (replying to this email should suffice). In your
acknowledgment please let us know whether or not you are satisfied
with the working group's response to your comment.
Regards,
Bijan Parsia
on behalf of the W3C OWL Working Group
Received on Thursday, 29 January 2009 13:38:18 UTC