- From: Jim Hendler <hendler@cs.umd.edu>
- Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2006 14:18:13 -0400
- To: Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>
- Cc: Daniel Gresh <dgresh@lle.rochester.edu>, public-owl-dev@w3.org
At 13:57 -0400 8/11/06, Alan Ruttenberg wrote: >On Aug 11, 2006, at 1:50 PM, Jim Hendler wrote: > >> While I am not at all upset with your move to OWL Full (and wish >>everyone else would as well), I admit that there may be cases where >>using tools like Pellet can be useful, and the report above shows >>some fairly easy to use approaches > >Well that's a provocative statement! Why do you wish everyone would >move to owl full? > >-Alan I've never hidden the fact, and have said in public on many occasions, that I felt it was a mistake to have multiple OWL profiles, and that the restrictions on DL were such that they add significant complexity for OWL use with little gain. That said, having lost this debate back in the Web Ontology Working Group, my group has gone along with this decision, developing OWL DL tools (such as Pellet), debugging tools for OWL DL (in SWOOP), etc. I should mention that I strongly believe most of these tools would work just fine with some small heuristic changes to relax the restrictions imposed by OWL DL, meaning tools could simply be "OWL Tools" and not Full v. DL. What would change is that if one lived outside the restrictions of what is now called OWL DL, you would lose some reasoning guarantees, but I happen to believe, unlike many in this community, that those guarantees are drastically over-rated, and contribute to people being able to publish papers, not to real systems that real people want to use to solve real problems. Needing workarounds for things like this user's problems (he is trying to do the straight-forward encoding, and now he will need to do extra work if he wants to use the current tools), or even worse to have database keys (i.e. inversefunctional datatypes properties) was a very foolish mistake on our part, and I believe the community will either come to regret it (by seeing OWL use replaced by rule implementations) or will have to come up with workable solutions (some of which, I'm happy to say, are happening in the OWL 1.1 framework that Bijan mentioned). In other words, it would make much more sense for us to fix our tools instead of fixing our users (with the connotation of neutering in the latter case being very much intended). -JH -- Prof James Hendler hendler@cs.umd.edu Dept of Computer Science http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler AV Williams Bldg 301-405-2696 (work) Univ of Maryland 301-405-6707 (Fax) College Park, MD 20853 USA
Received on Friday, 11 August 2006 18:19:10 UTC