Re: Work in Progress on Web Ontology Working Group (Advance Notice)

FUB is of course in favour of the establishment of the new Web  
Ontology WG, and it is in favour of approach (3) to do the fragment  
work in parallel.
cheers
--e. (AC rep for FUB)

Enrico Franconi                  - franconi@inf.unibz.it
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano - http://www.inf.unibz.it/~franconi/
Faculty of Computer Science      - Phone: (+39) 0471-016-120
I-39100 Bozen-Bolzano BZ, Italy  - Fax:   (+39) 0461-173-9006

On 5 Jun 2007, at 22:22, Susan Lesch wrote:

> Dear Advisory Committee Representative,
>
> Following up on the OWL 1.1 Member Submission [1] and the  
> successful OWLED
> Workshop series (Gallway, Ireland 2005 [2]; Athens, GA, USA 2006  
> [3]; and
> Innsbruck, Austria [upcoming, 4]) the Team is currently working on  
> a draft
> charter to launch a renewed Web Ontology Working Group as part of  
> the Semantic
> Web Activity. The purpose of this Working Group is to produce W3C
> Recommendations for an extension to the Web Ontology Language  
> (OWL). The work
> represents a relatively small set of extensions of OWL that have been:
>
>  - Identified by users as widely needed
>  - Identified by tool implementers as reasonable and
>    feasible extensions to current tools.
>
> The draft charter is available at [5].
>
> During the preliminary discussions as well as in the OWL 1.1  
> Submission [1],
> the issue of "OWL fragments" also came to the fore. This term  
> refers to useful
> and usable sub-languages of OWL that are (more) tractable and/or  
> efficiently
> implementable (e.g., with standard relational and deductive database
> technology or simple rule base systems) than the current OWL  
> dialects [6].
> Both vendors and the users in the Semantic Web community have  
> expressed
> significant interest in this work. The Team is considering three  
> possible
> approaches to address this issue:
>
> 1.  Start a separate Working Group concentrating on OWL
>     fragments. (This approach is assumed by the current draft
>     charter [5]. In its current revision the draft does not
>     address the fragment work.)
>
>  2. Fold the OWL fragment work into the new Web Ontology
>     Working Group as a second phase of activity, i.e.,
>     postpone the work until the core OWL extension is done,
>     and start the OWL fragment work at about T+12.
>
>  3. Fold the OWL fragment work into the new Web Ontology
>     Working Group and start in parallel with the OWL
>     extensions.
>
> The Team feels that more input from the community (for example, Member
> Submissions) is needed before W3C starts work on OWL fragments, in  
> contrast to
> the OWL extension work that is already more mature (e.g., in the  
> OWL 1.1
> Member Submission [1]). There are pros and cons for each approach  
> and the Team
> would welcome the advice of the W3C Membership as well as experts  
> at large as
> to which of the three approaches is the most feasible.
>
> The Team expects to publish the draft charter and formally propose  
> it to the
> W3C Advisory Committee around mid-July 2007. We welcome your general
> expressions of interest and support on <w3c-ac-forum@w3.org>.
>
> Please send any substantive comments in response to this email or  
> the OWL 1.1
> Submission [1] to <public-owl-dev@w3.org>, which has a public  
> archive [7], or
> continue Member-confidential discussion on <w3c-ac-forum@w3.org>.  
> We are also
> soliciting informal input from the participants of the public-owl- 
> dev@w3.org
> mailing list.
>
> If you should have questions or need further information, please  
> feel free to
> contact Ivan Herman at <ivan@w3.org> or Sandro Hawke at  
> <sandro@w3.org> or
> send your question to <w3t-semweb-review@w3.org> (a Team list).
>
> This announcement has been sent in accordance with section 5.1  
> "Activity
> Proposal Development" [8] of the W3C Process Document.
>
> Thank you,
> Susan Lesch, W3C Communications Team
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/Submission/2006/10/
> [2] http://www.mindswap.org/2005/OWLWorkshop/
> [3] http://owl-workshop.man.ac.uk/OWLWorkshop06.html
> [4] http://owled2007.iut-velizy.uvsq.fr
> [5] http://www.w3.org/2007/05/WebOntCharter.html
> [6] http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/
> [7] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-dev
> [8] http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/ 
> activities#ActivityDevelopment

Received on Wednesday, 6 June 2007 23:49:34 UTC