[LC Response] To M. Scott Marshall Re: OWL2 comments

Dear Scott,

Thank you for your message
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/2009Jan/0027.html>
on the OWL 2 Web Ontology Language last call drafts.

Thank you for your support of new features in OWL 2.

The OWL WG acknowledges that there are applications where one would like
to use OWL and RIF.  However, the needs of a representation language
have driven the OWL WG to make certain choices regarding which datatypes
are in OWL 2.  The OWL WG has tried to support a large collection of
datatypes, which may be larger than that supported by RIF.  Applications
that want to use both OWL and RIF can restrict themselves to those
datatypes that are supported by both OWL and RIF.

The OWL WG had wanted to have a single base type for its numeric types,
namely owl:realPlus.  Several comments, yours included, have resulted in
the OWL WG moving to align with XML Schema, and thus RIF, so that in OWL
2 xsd:decimal, xsd:float, and xsd:double now have pairwise disjoint
value spaces.  As a result of this change the need for owl:realPlus has
disappeared and it has been removed from OWL 2.  Several OWL 2 documents
have been or are being modified to effect these changes.

The OWL WG has realized that an overview document would be useful and to
that end has produced the Document Overview, with working draft
available at http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/Document_Overview

The typographical error that you point out in the New Features and
Rationale document has been fixed.

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,
Peter F. Patel-Schneider
on behalf of the W3C OWL Working Group

Received on Wednesday, 18 March 2009 19:17:58 UTC