- From: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2009 19:57:20 +0000
- To: Timothy Redmond <tredmond@stanford.edu>
- Cc: Ian Horrocks <ian.horrocks@comlab.ox.ac.uk>, "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>, Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>, public-owl-wg@w3.org
On 18 Feb 2009, at 19:30, Timothy Redmond wrote: > I wanted to be sure that I understood where things stand with this > issue. It seems to me that XML Catalogs can be used to satisfy the > use > cases that I have. (I have another use case where XML Catalogs would > also seem to work). But this only works if a critical mass of the > tools > adopt or at least support this mechanism. Yes. But XML Catalogs are a standard and widely (AFAICT) technique in the wider world. We should avoid reinventing the wheel! This raises a community problem, of course, but I think that's best left to the community. If we put it, for example, into the OWL API, that will do a whole hell of a lot to raise awareness and to actually disseminate the solution. > For example, I know a group that has users who check ontologies out > from > svn and edit them. This group of users all favor different tool sets > and I think that one of their challenges is getting these tools to > work > nicely together. Putting an XML catalog in svn will only help if > TopBraid, OntoEdit, Protege 4, etc all can read this format. Sure. > Having > different repository formats for different tools is the status quo and > is awkward. Right, but AFAIK, there's no competing standard. So people should simply bug their implementors. Or write translators to and from XML Catalogs to the various private formats (e.g., Jena has one; once you have a wrapper/translator for jena and the owl api you are, for many purposes, done). [snip] > So my question is, do the other members of the working group feel that > XML Catalogs are an acceptable compromise or solution? Good question. > If so is there > some way that the owl working group can encourage tool builders to use > XML Catalogs? Or would we recommend low level mechanisms that > redirect > the URL based IO independently of the tool set? If you check the minutes for the..er...second f2f (in DC) you'll see that a bespoke mechanism was proposed there and rejected (with some mention of XML Catalogs there, as well). I don't think there is much the working group can do at this point. There is a standard (XML Catalogs). Individually, we can recommend it. With a good strong push from people like yourself I think it could get uptake with OWL 2. But as its not part of the language, there's not much for us to do. Cheers, Bijan.
Received on Wednesday, 18 February 2009 19:53:50 UTC