Rich Annotations

Time to kick off discussion.

The current draft of the proposal is here:
	http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/Annotation_System

If people would like examples "in action" I can easily supply them.

In the telecon, Jeremy expressed basically two qualms which we can  
see reiterated:
	<http://www.w3.org/mid/4746D424.5060203@hpl.hp.com>[1]

The qualms are:
	1) This is a big change (too big for an OWL 1.1 change)
	2) This is hard to deal with in OWL Full

I don't think it's a big change and I tried to illustrate that with  
one way of formalizing it (with external documents). A rather simpler  
way is to add statements to reified annotations (which are already,  
if very weakly, accounted for).

There are three aspects of the proposal:

	1) Blobs of annotations (mere syntax)
	2) Annotation spaces (an extension of the current "no semantics"  
interpretation; OWL Full can be handled by taking the union of the  
spaces).
	3) mustUnderstand (this *is*, perhaps, a major extension, but an  
extra logical one; it's a very standard bit of webbiness! it's a hook  
that allows for extensibility).

The degree of 3 is *very* minimal. It's basically a flag saying "Hey,  
the author has done something funky and unless you know what that is  
you are at high risk of misrepresenting that intent!!!" Thus, it does  
not *need* a semantic treatment. This captures a *fair* bit of  
current practice (i.e., where in people extend OWL in a variety of  
ways, from e-connections to SWRL), but improves interop.

Indeed, annotation spaces can be seen as syntactic sugar for literals  
or other encodings of syntax into owl or of using multiple documents.  
So conceptually (and praxis-wise) there is nothing new except the  
hint to tools that some encoding might be very significant.

Cheers,
Bijan.

[1] N.B., I don't appreciate the continued use of derogation in your  
comments, e.g.,
	<http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/Teleconference.2007.11.21/Minutes>
	"""Jeremy Carroll: out of court. More about 'lets' put some wacky  
stuff in' instead of a conservative improvement over 1.0"""

I believe the proposal is conservative, sane, and not remotely  
exotic. You may hate it, but that's hardly the same as it either  
being wacky or it being an unmotivated, semi-random addition. It  
would have been sufficient to say, "I believe it may be out of scope  
for our charter and require rather too big a change for this iteration."

Received on Friday, 23 November 2007 15:35:19 UTC