review of RIF-RDF-OWL

Here are some thoughts that we might want to turn into a WG comment.

I will follow up with discussion, and some other left-over comments.

The last comment #17 is the only one that either should be made as a WG 
comment or not at all. The missing numbers are at

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2008May/0008

for the overly keen.



=======================================



This is a draft review of
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-rif-rdf-owl-20080415/

1) Overall:

This reads as a mature and complete document, and it is
plausible to have last call soon.


5) editors note, end of section 1, opinion

I suggest you do not consider RDF entailment,
the others are more interesting.

[[To OWL WG the others included simple, RDFS and D entailment]]

section 2

6) Table 1 (and in general), change

I am not impressed with "literal string@en"^^rif:text
I suggest changing this to "literal string"@en

Rationale: the convention for displaying such items is well-established,
and it introduces spurious and unnecessary confusion to readers familiar
with such conventions not to follow it.

7) general comment, change

I am also not impressed with rif:iri

I suggest change of "a"^^rif:iri for <a>.

Otherwise this also provides unnecessary confusion. For example, what is
the relationship between rif:iri and xsd:anyURI? I see in the Wiki that
it is none, but it feels like an unmotivated new way of writing down a
URI ...

13) 2.1.2 defn of conforming datatype map, change

Requiring rif:text in the datatype map is well-wierd.

a) rif:text is not a datatype.
It is not defined anywhere much, the best I could find was on
http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wiki/DTB
with the text
[[
This symbol space represents text strings with a language tag attached.
The lexical space of rif:text is the set of all Unicode strings of the
form ...@LANG, i.e., strings that end with @LANG where LANG is a
language identifier as defined in [RFC-3066].
]]
which doesn't merit review time.

b) it is wholly unclear why rif:text should be a datatype and rif:iri is
not, they both seem to be cases of NIH

c) it seems that this definition is used in the notion of D-satisfiable
in section 2.2.2. It is not plausible that an RDF implementation will
implement such a 'datatype', even if it were adequately specced, (since
it duplicates RDF functionality and would cause confusion) so the
definition is made worthless.

16) 2.2.1.2 last example concerning conditions 5 and 6, comment

This ^^rif:iri stuff is confusing, can't you change it to something more
familiar?


The sentence in the Wiki:
[[
A rif:iri constant must be interpreted as a reference to one and the
same object regardless of the context in which that constant occurs.
]]
and the exclusion of rif:iri from conforming datatype maps, suggests
that you aware that this things get treated differently from datatypes.

Sorry I seem to be saying the same thing again ...

17) 3, last para before 3.1, change
[for OWL WG to consider - will not be a personal comment]

I suggest replacing the sentence

[[
This paves the way towards combination with OWL 2, which is envisioned
to allow punning in all its syntaxes.
]]

and the sentence from 3.2.2.3

[[
It is currently expected that OWL 2 will not define a semantics for
annotation and ontology properties; therefore, the below definition
cannot be extended to the case of OWL 2.
]]

with a less definitive statement such as:

[[
In this document, we are using OWL to refer to OWL1. While OWL2 is still
in development it is unclear how RIF will interoperate with it. At the
time of writing we believe that with OWL2 the support for punning may be
beneficial, and that there might be particular problems in using section
3.2.2.3.
]]


I hope these were helpful, and I didn't get too upset about the rif:iri
rif:text thing!


Jeremy

Received on Tuesday, 6 May 2008 17:39:01 UTC