ISSUE-108: naming of profiles

Dear all,

I wasn't able to attend last week's telecon because of travelling and
will not be able to attend this week's one due to a conflicting
meeting (sigh). In the minutes, I saw that issue-108 was discussed
last week and deferred to this week.

For what it's worth, here is my opinion on it. I think that instead of
insisting on the consistent use of one or two-letter names for all
profiles, it is more important to choose good names, i.e., names that
have that highlight a special feature of the fragment and can be
remembered, but are still not too long.  My vote goes to OWL-DB and
OWL-R. The EL profile is more difficult, and I prefer either OWL-EL or
OWL-T, with T standing for *tractable*, and *not* for TBox as
suggested last week.

Some reasons:

- OWL-DB: short and nicely captures the intended use. Much more
   catchy and descriptive than OWL-D

- OWL-R: it seems there is agreement that the "rules" nature of this
   fragment is what we want to emphasize, so OWL-R is just natural

- For the EL fragment, I strongly dislike the proposals OWL-T (with
   T for TBox) and OWL-C (with C for class) because they are neither
   catchy nor sufficiently descriptive ("TBox" is only understandable
   to DL people and neither "TBox" nor "class" says much at all).

   OWL-EL is very descriptive to those that know about DLs, but clearly
   there are a lot of OWL users that don't. So an option is OWL-T with
   T for tractable, as tractability of the main reasoning problem
   subsumption was the design goal of this profile (the other fragments
   also happen to be tractable, but that was not the optimization
   criterion in their design, and they could be further extended without
   losing tractability).

greetings,
                 Carsten

PS: If issue-108 can be deferred by one week, I am happy to participate
     in the discussion.

--
*      Carsten Lutz, Institut f"ur Theoretische Informatik, TU Dresden       *
*     Office phone:++49 351 46339171   mailto:lutz@tcs.inf.tu-dresden.de     *

Received on Wednesday, 25 June 2008 16:35:21 UTC