Re: Proposal to resolve Issue-108

I don't think the issue is resistance, I think the issue is change --  
currently Google finds 59000 hits for the phrase "OWL Full"  - I  
suspect a lot of those won't be changed, so both Full and FL would be  
out there to cause confusion -- or if you want something more specific  
-  Dean Allemang and I have a book which refers to OWL DL and OWL Full  
-- we'll eventually do a second edition (we hope) to include the OWL 2  
stuff, but till then, the book's not about to be republished (not is  
the van Harmelen book, or any of the 5-6 other Sem Web books out  
there) -- so you would add tremendous confusion to change "full" to  
"FL" just so that there's a resonance in names -- I definitely think  
this is one of those "backwards compatibility" issues your charter  
mandates be considered -- I  understand why it would be nice to have  
two-letter names for everything, but I don't think it overcomes the  
barrier -- naming new profiles consistently is great, but changing old  
ones is confusing and incurs real cost in both OWL adoption (more  
confusion = less use) and in real dollars - remember that change has  
economic consequences for real people in the real world.
  -JH
p.s. Note that if the group decided to go with 4 letter names, so Full  
would stay the same but DL would become, say, "DLog" then I would have  
the same complaint - this isn't a Full vs. DL issue, it's a "be very  
conservative on change" issue


On Aug 6, 2008, at 9:48 AM, Michael Smith wrote:

>
> On Mon, 2008-08-04 at 18:01 +0100, Ian Horrocks wrote:
>> Jim Hendler has pointed out that there may be some resistance to
>> renaming existing languages (i.e., Full) given that many books and
>> papers have already been published using those names, and companies
>> have tools that already claim to support them.
>
> OWL FL might be a two letter name for Full that causes less  
> resistance.
> -- 
> Mike Smith
>
> Clark & Parsia
>
>

"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

Received on Wednesday, 6 August 2008 14:23:50 UTC