Re: profiles and the rec track

On 27 Jan 2009, at 19:06, Jim Hendler wrote:

> Bijan
>   I will pass your email on -
>   As far as charter, you yourself have said a number of times that  
> it is up to the WG to decide what is rec track and what isn't

I still believe that. I'm just wondering if you agree with the advice  
with regard to profiles as you give with regard to UCR in:

	<http://www.w3.org/mid/C76F33CF-12C5-4998-9F2E-F70068195F9A@cs.rpi.edu>

That advice seems reasonable. It's not absolute, of course. But it  
seems that we may be in for trouble *either way*.

> - I think we've certainly met the charter requirements on the  
> design of the profiles.  Yes, I have said at other times I'd like  
> to see the deliverables rec track, and if it was a perfect world  
> I'd still be arguing for the profiles, but as I said in the email  
> that started this thread, this was a new realization for me, and  
> took a lot of thought.

I'm just concerned that we make our decisions in a consistent way.  
One way of reading the charter is that the OWL 1.1 language (i.e.,  
all the spec stuff) needs to be rec track. As part of that general  
recommendation we must produce some informative stuff. If we unioned  
all the documents into one big spec, we would go through and mark a  
bunch of things non-normative. One way to do that is to put them in a  
different document which is a note.

Here we're talking about taking what was generally understood to be a  
part of the language design and making *it* non-normative.

I'm just pointing out that this is potentially procedurally non- 
trivial, regardless of the merits. Of course, I'm often willing to  
try non-trivial things if the merits warrant it :) But then the  
arguments need to be pretty strong. Consider the last call comments  
thus far on profiles:

+0.1 <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/2009Jan/ 
att-0051/index.html>
	"""Profiles
We are generally supportive, but would not oppose a scaling back of  
this effort in light of comments from other consortium members."""

+0.9 <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/2009Jan/ 
0046.html>
	"""and a very quick look at "Direct Semantics" and "Profiles". ...
So, I think these docs are fine and the features introduced in OWL2
interesting (though much anticipated)."""

-1 <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/2009Jan/ 
0042.html>
	(Frank)
+1 <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/2009Jan/ 
0039.html>
        (no details, but I feel confident that he's supportive at  
least of OWL RL)

-1 <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/2009Jan/ 
0033.html>
	Susie Stephens for Lilly
+1 <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/2009Jan/ 
0025.html>
	"""Iąd like to express my support for the proposed extensions and  
profiles
described in OWL 2 Web Ontology Language New Features and Rationale.
This is from the perspective of implementing SNOMED-CT, where the EL  
profile
is particularly relevant."""

+0.5 <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/2009Jan/ 
0024.html>
         (No details, but discusses them.)

+1 <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/2009Jan/ 
0020.html>
	"""The documents on the different language profiles is extremely  
welcome as
are the different tractable fragments. For us the tractable fragments
are extremely useful in providing guidance on which aspect of OWL 2 to
use for certain problems. We expect to have many applications of OWL at
Ordnance Survey, and each of these fragments will be applicable for
solving different problems. Also section 5 on the computation properties
was a very welcome and useful (and something I'd wanted to see for a
while). This should make things clearer to Person and not Logician. """

+1 <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/2009Jan/ 
0019.html>
	They are proposing adding stuff to OWL QL
+1fuzzy <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/ 
2009Jan/0016.html>
	"""I'd like to express my interest in and support for the proposed  
extensions
to be incorporated in OWL2, particularly from the perspective of  
SNOMED-CT
whose development I'm actively involved in."""
	(SNOMED people generally support OWL-EL
+1 <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/2009Jan/ 
0014.html>
	Propose new features for OWL QL. They are the DL Lite designers.

I tried to give the benefit of the doubt "against" the profiles  
document. It's still overwhelming in support. I would tend to label  
Stephens' as fuzzy.
	+7.4 or +6.4 (if you don't count fuzzy).
	+ 5.5 if you exclude fuzzy and TQ.
	-2  or -3 (if you count TQ as negative, which they weren't :))

Given all this, I think that it would be very difficult to de-Rec  
profiles. It would certainly call for some sort of last call (but  
that's weird...last call of...a de-reccing?).

I'd suggest that the AC Reps that you are in discussion with send  
mail directly to the WG. At this point, we've pretty much said that  
Profiles is rec track and so it'd be a pretty big deal to back down  
on that. We'd need some heavy ammunition.

So, I think I would not support that absent heavy ammunition  
regardless of the overall merits unless the situation changed quite a  
bit. (I.e., it might work to have a delayed CR if the group were  
extended or something. I don't know.)

Other research or corrections to the codings above would be welcome.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Tuesday, 27 January 2009 19:37:33 UTC