response for LC comment 23 JR1

I've talked with Jeremy Rogers to find out what he meant in LC comment
23.  After some discussion we agreed that a response along these lines
would be OK.

peter




[Draft Response for LC Comment 23] JR1

Dear Jeremy,

Thank you for your message
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/2009Jan/0028.html
on the OWL 2 Web Ontology Language last call drafts.

The WG believes that you are asking for the ability to constrain the
kinds
of additions that can or, perhaps, should be made to an ontology and/or
to
constrain certain inferences that can occur over filler classes. The WG
realizes that this is indeed a useful ability to have.

This is the province of representation languages that have
auto-epistemic features, and native support for this would constitute a
major extension to OWL, taking OWL into areas where much less is known
about complexity or even decidability of reason, where the state of the
art in reasoners is much less advanced, and even where there are still
disagreements about which language constructs are appropriate.  The OWL
WG thus has not seriously considered extensions in this direction,
instead appropriately waiting for results from research, implementation,
and use.

However, there is nothing preventing OWL user interface tools from
implementing these extra constraints for additions made through the
interface.  OWL user interface tools could mark classes as "abstract",
meaning that the tool would resist attempts to directly instantiate the
class, and could also mark properties in classes as "type required", and
check whether the filler belongs to the required class before any
addition.  OWL user interface tools could even use annotations to record
these interface conditions, which would preserve the conditions in the
ontology.

The OWL WG has not considered requiring support for these kinds of
interface conditions.  If there comes to be sufficient use of these
kinds of interface conditions, then it may be appropriate for a
subsequent working group to consider them.

Therefore, the OWL WG does not intend to make any changes in response to
your comment.

Please acknowledge receipt of this email to
<mailto:public-owl-comments@w3.org> (replying to this email should
suffice). In your acknowledgment please let us know whether or not you
are satisfied with the working group's response to your comment. 

Regards,
Peter F. Patel-Schneider
on behalf of the W3C OWL Working Group

Received on Tuesday, 24 February 2009 14:53:22 UTC