Re: [UFDTF] Deb and Evan's outline proposal

From: Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>
Subject: [UFDTF] Deb and Evan's outline proposal
Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2008 23:18:11 -0500

> The feedback requested is of the outline (the one labeled "Potential  
> new overview) and whether, assuming the content is of the same style  
> (possibly reused where relevant) as the current overview, addresses  
> some of the issues discussed at the F2F meeting, and whether the  
> content, if ordered in that way, would satisfy the requirements of an  
> overview, in your opinion. To the extent that it incorporates content  
> in the stye of the OWL 1.0 overview, constructive comments about that  
> content are solicited.
> 
> -Alan

It is very hard to determine whether this outline would be viable
without more details.    I note that the outline is extremely close to
the outline for the OWL 1.0 Overview.  The proposal can be quite
accurately summed up as

	Take the current OWL 1.0 Overview and retarget it from OWL Lite
	to OWL 1.1 with as few changes as possible

There are several parts of the outline that I do not like (i.e., that I
do not like in the outline of the OWL 1.0 Overview).  In particular, I
am against having a section "OWL RDF Schema Features", particularly in
an overview and particularly starting the language description with this
section.  Calling a section "OWL Annotation Properties" is also not
ideal, in my view.  Having a section on "OWL Versioning" also seems
strange, as there is very little in OWL to support versioning.

As far as potential content goes, and assuming that the content will be
slightly changed versions of the OWL 1.0 Overview, I have very strong
reservations.  Organizing the language synopsis largely by keywords is,
in my opinion, entirely the wrong way to go - instead the organization
of a language synopsis, if there is to be an language synopsis in an
overview, should be by concept.  I find the content of the Language
Description to be much less cohesive than it should be - I would much
prefer a document that describes the various language constructs in
context as opposed to the relatively bare listing style of the OWL 1.0
Overview.

In sum, I believe that a different organization and content of an
overview-like document is called for.

Peter F. Patel-Schneider
Bell Labs Research

Received on Monday, 14 January 2008 07:49:49 UTC