[LC response] To Jonathan Rees

Dear Jonathan,

Thank you for your comment
     <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/2009Jan/0047.html>
on the OWL 2 Web Ontology Language last call drafts.

Thank you for pointing out some drawbacks in the definitions in Section 2.1. We
have rewritten the section slightly in hope that this has made the definitions
clearer. We have replaced "elements of the structural specification" by
"instances of the various UML classes" -- the latter notion is precisely defined
in UML. Please note, however, that the notion of the structural specification is
not defined by UML: it is "proprietary" to OWL 2 and amounts to the well-known
notion of deep equality. To make the definition clearer, we have removed phrases
like "can be considered to be equal" and have presented the definition in terms
of the notions available from UML.

The definition of the ontology is normative, and it is part of the structural
specification: it defines the term "ontology" by placing some restrictions on an
instance of the UML class "Ontology". It is common practice to describe
conditions on UML structures in English, and our document just follows this
common practice.

The OMG's reference for UML is the only normative definition of UML we are aware
of. There are many other, more user-friendly descriptions of UML and readers are
more than welcome to consult them; however, from a specification point of view,
we believe that citing the official UML standard is more appropriate.

The notions of abstract classes and of class instantiation are both available in
UML. It is true that the two notions coincide with the ones used in
object-oriented programming; however, in our specification we are merely using
the terminology defined by UML.

We do not intend to provide an OWL version of the UML diagrams, at least not as
a normative part of our specification.

The following URI summarizes the changes to the Syntax document that were
introduced to address your comment:

http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/index.php?title=Syntax&diff=19734&oldid=19729

Thanks again for your comments!

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Regards,
Boris Motik
on behalf of the W3C OWL Working Group

Received on Wednesday, 18 March 2009 20:10:27 UTC