Primer

Hi Bijan, et al,

Here are a few comments on http://webont.org/owl/documents/primer-exp.html.

Conrad

  My most general comment is that it would be better to start with the
  OWL 1 documents and merge them to reduce redundancy, update for new
  features, and make corrections and clarifications, rather than start a
  completely new document.  To users OWL 1.1 is a release with some
  additional expressiveness.  It's not a major overhaul.  The
  documentation should reflect that.  I don't think the burden should be
  to comment on this proposed document, but to comment on OWL 1.

  I used the OWL 1 Reference Manual almost exclusively, and particularly
  appreciated Appendix B (RDF Schema of OWL), and Appendix C (Quick
  Reference).  Would be good to carry these forward.

  The buttons for syntax choice are very cool.  We need to ensure the
  document prints properly, perhaps will all the syntaxes by default,
  because folks printing things out for travel will probably not realize
  they need to set the buttons first.

  Section 2.1:

    It's a very good idea to provide some reasons for the software
    community at large to pay attention to OWL, which is the purpose of
    the section.

    I think this section should to introduce and use the notion of
    expressiveness, since the concept is usually only implicit in the
    typical software practitioners thinking.  Then the languages can be
    compared with examples, eg, OWL is more expressive than RDF, OO more
    expressive (mostly) than DB's, OWL more than (the structual parts
    of) OO, etc.

    An important topic to cover is the differences between
    classification in OWL and OO.  To the typical software practioner,
    OWL looks like yet another OO language, minus the code.  They're
    quite different, of course, and this needs to be brought out.  I
    have a small series of examples that show this.  Will send out
    separately.

Received on Thursday, 17 January 2008 20:58:14 UTC