Re: ISSUE-126 (Revisit Datatypes): The list of normative datatypes should be revisited

All,

Sorry I missed yesterday's call.  Looking at the minutes I see that you 
did get to the
discussion on Boris' datatypes issue.  I have a few comments.

Scientific use of OWL isn't the only place where datatype support is 
critical.  It is
also very important for engineering.  Expanded datatype support is key 
to the
uptake of OWL for product and process engineering applications.  The 
extensions
in OWL1.1 -> OWL 2 were a big improvement and the suggestion to add support
for Real/Rational arithmetic is a great development for my domain.  We 
do, however,
need to be very clear about how this relates to exchange and 
computational types.

Let me also underline Bijan's point about the proposal potentially 
affecting existing
ontologies.  I am currently involved in defining a "foundational" 
vocabulary with
an associated ontology for Date and Time.  We are hoping to reuse OWL 
Time for this.
The OWL 1 rendering of OWL Time makes use of xsd types for a number of 
things
including identifying a year and month for a time interval associated 
with a
DateTimeDescription.  It also carefully uses integer for datatype 
properties using
ordinal numbers to identify say a day of the week or a week in a 
WeekYear calendar,
while still using xsd decimal for seconds in a date-time.  While it 
would probably be
a good thing to change OWL Time, in any case, to make use of new 
constructs in OWL 2,
we really need to understand what datatypes to use for these things if 
support for integer
and xsd date types is discouraged.

-Evan

Evan K. Wallace
Manufacturing Systems Integration Division
NIST

Received on Thursday, 19 June 2008 15:48:04 UTC