Re: More background on OWL dot OWL file

Hi Holger,

If we are to continue this discussion, we should probably move this to  
public-owl-dev as it probably won't affect any decision of the WG.  
(Public-owl-comments is not, to my knowledge, as widely read as public- 
owl-dev.)

If you follow the link I in:
	http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-wg/2009Jul/0030.html
You'll see that the idea of importing SWRL.owl is exactly what I argue  
against, so it's a bit odd to appeal to it as an exemplar.

I'm well aware of how systems use such files (as is clear by my  
reference to SWI Prolog), but think that that use is by and large  
misguided and sometimes harmful. The implementation burden reduction  
is generally quite minimal, IMHO. In any case, there's no need for a  
central "canonical" version of the file in order for you to use this  
implementation technique. Nothing stops TobBraid from using this sort  
of mechanism internally. Indeed, I hope you cache your copy of owl.owl  
instead of hitting the W3C server each time! (I would be shocked if  
you didn't cache, but not everyone is conscientious.)

I don't find the linked data argument compelling as fundamental  
enabling technology doesn't need to use distributed extensibility  
mechanisms (unlike, for example, ad hoc vocabularies). This is not an  
uncommon view, nor is it is in any way in tension with the growth of  
the web or the semantic web.

This is clearly a fairly strong technical disagreement, one which we  
are unlikely to come to agreement on.

However, I've indicated that I won't, at the moment, oppose this sort  
of thing thus there is no need to resolve our disagreement. But this  
is a very very weak form of consensus and I wanted the record to  
reflect this fact.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Tuesday, 21 July 2009 21:18:56 UTC