concerns about RDF Mapping doc

At the telecon last night, I (successfully) requested a weakening of the 
proposal for first publication, to leave it open as to whether the RDF 
Mapping doc would be included or not.

This was not an attempt to immediately advocate that it should not be 
included; merely an attempt to leave it open to advocate that it should 
not be included.

My motivation for doing this was that in an HP internal reviews of all 
three documents, the reviewer had minor issues with the other two docs 
but had more major issues with RDF Mappping.

Before advocacy one way or another, I will need to refresh my memory: 
looking at both the most recent version of RDF Mapping, and the HP 
internal review.

If I remember correctly the heart of the criticism was that:

a) The OWL 1.1 suite of docs, do not include an OWL Full semantics. HP 
regard an OWL Full semantics as critical.

b) In OWL 1.0, the tension between the OWL Full semantics and the direct 
semantics is resolved in cleverly non-deterministic mapping rules

c) The OWL 1.1 mapping rules, probably in order to simplify life for the 
implementers, have reduced the non-determinism (and the cleverness)

d) In the HP reviewer's opinion the reduction in the non-determinism 
severely impacted the ability to define an appropriate OWL 1.1 Full 
semantics.

In my view, if this criticism stands, then, it is a criticism of the 
whole document, rather than of a few paragraps or sections.

It also reflects a value judgement that OWL Full semantic compatibility 
is more important than simplifying life for the implementors of the 
mapping rules, even at the risk of being too clever by half.

Jeremy

(carefully sketching a position that I might hold later, or some 
anonymous HP reviewer might hold; without actually committing to it!)

Received on Thursday, 18 October 2007 14:34:59 UTC