RE: OWL "Sydney Syntax", structured english

On Wed, 2006-11-29 at 23:54 +1100, Anne Cregan wrote:
[...]
> 
> ** That said, I would like to invite Dan Connolly from the W3C to
> comment on what he would see as the next steps for moving towards a
> W3C-endorsed standardization on some kind of controlled English syntax
> for OWL. **
>
> I˙m pretty new to W3C processes, but in my opinion, the first order of
> business would be to determine what ´OWLglishˇ or whatever we end up
> calling it should look like, and how it should behave.  Sifting
> through the postings, several design considerations/requirements have
> already come up.  I would suggest as a starting point, that we collect
> these into a list, and post it somewhere on the W3C site (if Dan
> agrees) or else at some other convenient location, to provide a basis
> for focused discussion, debate and tasks.

I know what "order of business" and "we" mean the context of a
Working Group, but this owl-dev list is just a mailing list where
each participant does mostly whatever they feel like doing.

As to W3C process, we're in an informal stage, where I try to keep
an eye out for what seems cost-effective to standardize. Things
like DAML and RDF Query moved from the informal stage to a
Working Group only after several different development groups
were talking about interoperability in very tangible ways:
a set of RDF Query use cases and test queries started growing
almost on its own, and it was pretty clear that giving it
the structure of a W3C working group would be worthwhile.
I think they were using the ESW Wiki at some point;
see http://esw.w3.org/topic/RDFQueryTestCases .
In the case of DAML/OWL, it was a fairly organized research
program that resulted in multiple development groups getting
to the "almost done" point.

I don't see several OWL structured english projects struggling
to interchange test cases... not yet, anyway. And standardizing
character-level syntaxes is a *lot* of work. The SPARQL
punctuationSyntax issue has been opened and closed and opened
for years now.
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/DataAccess/issues#punctuationSyntax

I think the Structured English stuff is a very interesting technical
topic to follow, but I think it should mature informally for
a while before I start to look at it as a candidate for standarization.


-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Wednesday, 29 November 2006 15:06:02 UTC