Re: UFDTF - who are we writing for

On Nov 26, 2007, at 12:43 PM, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:

> From: Jim Hendler <hendler@cs.rpi.edu>
> Subject: UFDTF - who are we writing for
> Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2007 12:00:52 -0500
>
> [...]
>
>> ANSWER 1: Someone like me wants a reference manual
>>   OK, Bijan argued that since users will mainly use OWL through
>> tools, they didn't really need to know most of this.  Ok, maybe, but
>> suppose I got to a SWOOP or Protege for OWL1.1 and create a new
>> property - I get a menu asking me what kind of property it is.  One
>> of my choices is
>>          owl11:irreflexive property.
>
> This doesn't sound very likely.  In Protege 4.0, for example, the tab
> for creating an object property is called "Object Properties" and the
> options under it include "Irreflexive".

ok, that just makes it harder - I need to search the documents  
without knowing what it is actually called... point is, I need to  
know what OWL means by a term like inversefunctional or irreflexive  
or the like

>
> My take on this is that a Protege user isn't going to get much out of
> the OWL 1.0 Overview or Guide or Reference, because these  
> documents  talk a
> different language.

yet, strangely, many of the students I've worked with in professional  
courses have read the Guide or Ref, decided they were interested in  
OWL, and then gone to learn Protege.  At least some have reported to  
me that they still refer back to those docs when they are doing their  
modeling (i.e. figuring out what they want to say) and then figure  
out how to express it in Protege/OWL

however, seems to me that the whole "he said, she said" of who does  
what is the wrong approach (as I said on the UFDTF telecon) because  
it seems to me we have a priori evidence that people are linking to  
and reading these documents,  which in my mind argues for their  
utility without us needing to analyze the users.  Note that I would  
make the same point for S&AS and the new technical documents - I  
don't ask who the readers of them are, I see value in the fact that  
they exist and are used.  We certainly are not arguing to get rid of  
them because they cause problems - modulo the updating of S&AS - so I  
don't see why we are having this stupid argument with respect to the  
other documents.

However, I also don't see why we continue to argue this -- Section 2  
of our charter is unambiguous as mandating at least sections, if not  
whole documents, called requirements, overview, descriptive spec,  
user guide and test suite -- so if we don't include those, we're not  
in in compliance and we'll never get to Rec-- maybe we're just  
arguing about when we will get around to doing it?



>
> peter

"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would  
it?." - Albert Einstein

Prof James Hendler				http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~hendler
Tetherless World Constellation Chair
Computer Science Dept
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY 12180