Re: [LC response] To Jim Hendler (was Re: Fwd: Question re: HasKey entailments)

This is a personal response.

I am, of course, surprised and dismayed that you would experience my  
sentence as an insult. In the email conversation you had with us  
which clarified this feature of OWL, you wrote (in <http://www.w3.org/ 
mid/3D9CD8CA-8994-4703-93EF-2E0753B2BF8E@cs.rpi.edu>):

""""However,  given two of us who had PhDs in AI and long experience  
with DBs took a while to work through the semantics, and didn't get  
the idea of these examples without the emails from you folks,  I do  
think documenting it will be important..."""

When drafting the response, I considered whether your not getting  
these use cases was function of your expertise. It is not uncommon  
for people with a lot of background in an area to read things  
differently than people new to an area. Obviously, we don't want to  
optimize our documents for experts. In this case, however, it was  
clear that the clarification was helpful to all readers. I included  
the sentence about your expertise in order to indicate that we had  
taken *all* of your remarks into careful consideration. Clearly, I  
step wrongly there.

There were those in the working group (e.g., Christine Golbreich) who  
were uneasy about that remark, but yielded to my judgment partly on  
the grounds that you and I have worked together for a long time and  
had a good relationship. You can see my reply to Christine wherein I  
argue against her on the grounds above:
	<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-wg/2009Jan/0203.html>
(Scroll to the end.)

In the discussion of your comment which led to working group approval  
of this comment:
	<http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/meeting/2009-02-04#JH1>
You'll see:
	"""Bijan Parsia: Jim was happy with the additional line to the  
document, that I sent to the mailing list"""

Which was a reference to an email you sent privately  to me in  
response to the following message:
	<http://www.w3.org/mid/ 
B0350B0D-2482-468D-84D7-71650CBBD524@cs.man.ac.uk>

You wrote:

"""not cc'ed

I have reason to believe that this would be accepted :-)
(and I like the additional line you came up with, so hope you'll add  
it.)
  -JH"""

Your email message contained the entirety of the draft response,  
including the offensive line.

It was on the basis of this message from you that I assured the  
working group that you were fine with the response, in spite of some  
misgivings. If the working group is to blame for anything, it was for  
placing to much confidence in my judgement.

I hope it is clear that there was no slight or insult intended and  
that the comment arose naturally from the discussion which included  
you and that it remained in the final message because of a confusion  
on my part and the working group's trust in me.

I apologize both to you and the working group for the trouble caused,  
and to Christine for dismissing her concern.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Thursday, 19 February 2009 10:01:16 UTC