Re: LC responses 28, 48 & 58

I think a lot of us would like to see the analogy

Owl DL : OWL 2 DL :: OWL Full : OWL 2 Full

that leaves some wiggle room in how you want to word these documents,  
but hard for me to see how anything else would be acceptable to the  
larger community -- i.e. OWL 2 without any modifier will be like OWL  
without a modifier -- referring to the whole family of languages  
rather than any particular variant (with DL, Full,  and the profiles  
being those variants for OWL 2).  Which are the normative definitions  
of each is up to these documents, but as several comments have made  
clear, OWL 2 and OWL 2 DL are not synonymous
   -JH
p.s.  I may be a purveyor  of the "current preferred semantic web  
story" as Peter so <word deleted to pass spam filters>  put it below,  
but I remind you there's a lot of us out here and we get to vote on  
the language in the end -- so be careful about being impolitic in  
these public forums...


On Mar 10, 2009, at 8:00 PM, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:

> From: "Michael Schneider" <schneid@fzi.de>
> Subject: RE: LC responses 28, 48 & 58
> Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 23:48:41 +0100
>
>> Hi Ian!
>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: public-owl-wg-request@w3.org [mailto:public-owl-wg-request@w3.org 
>>> ]
>>> On Behalf Of Ian Horrocks
>>> Sent: Saturday, March 07, 2009 6:50 PM
>>> To: W3C OWL Working Group
>>> Subject: LC responses 28, 48 & 58
>>>
>>> I drafted them. They all depend on the agreed presentation changes
>>> and probably shouldn't be sent until those are completed.
>>>
>>> Ian
>>
>> In the proposed answer to LC28
>>
>>  <http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/LC_Responses/FH2>
>>
>> it is stated:
>>
>> [[
>> OWL 2 separates syntax from semantics, and that OWL 2 Full,
>> DL, QL, EL and RL are all refer to syntactic variants,
>> ]]
>>
>> Frankly, this makes no sense to me. OWL 2 Full is certainly not a  
>> "syntactic
>> variant", just as OWL 1 Full hasn't been.
>
> OWL 2 Full is all ontologies / all RDF graphs.  A syntactic variant.
> This matches the wording in the last paragraph of Section 2.3 of the
> Document Overview but not that earlier in the Section.  I have  
> proposed
> changes to the Document Overview in my next message.
>
>> In the OWL 1 Full spec, there existed semantic-related terms like  
>> "OWL Full
>> interpretation" and "OWL Full entails". And OWL Full was  
>> characterized as
>> follows in a semantic way:
>>
>> <http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-semantics/rdfs.html#5.3>
>> [[
>> OWL Full augments the common conditions with conditions
>> that force the parts of the OWL universe
>> to be the same as their analogues in RDF.
>> [...]
>> ]]
>>
>
> And, as Ian says, this story is being changed slightly.
>
>> "OWL 2 Full" exclusively to mean the /semantics/.
>
> I argue against this.
>
> I'm quite willing to abuse the notation and let OWL 2 Full mean
> ontologies under the RDF-Based Semantics as well as just a syntax,  
> just
> as I would let OWL 2 DL mean ontologies that meet the syntactic
> characterisation of OWL 2 DL under the Direct Semantics as well as  
> just
> a syntax.
>
> Note that part of the OWL 2 DL syntactic conditions have been chosen
> only to allow for mapping into and out of RDF - these conditions are  
> not
> necessary to achieve the semantic and computational benefits of OWL 2
> DL.
>
>> But Jonathan Rees had a comment on this:
>>
>> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/2009Jan/0068.html
>> [[
>> And are you sure that you want "OWL 2 Full" to be the name of a  
>> semantics?
>> That seems OK to me, but it's sort of weird.  In common use I think  
>> it
>> will be taken to mean a language consisting of a combination of  
>> syntax
>> (RDF in any of its serializations) and
>> semantics (conditions on interpretation of the OWL 2 vocabulary).
>> ]]
>>
>> This sounds reasonable to me, so I am strongly inclined to follow  
>> this
>> comment. The term "OWL 2 Full" would then mean the whole language.  
>> But not
>> the syntax alone. This would make no sense to me, because the  
>> syntax of OWL
>> 2 Full is RDF, just as for OWL 1 Full and RDFS.
>
> Well, I would argue that the true language of OWL 2 Full is the
> Structural Specification.  The RDF serialisation is just something  
> that
> fits better into the current preferred Semantic Web story.
>
>> Best,
>> Michael
>
> peter
>
>
>

"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would  
it?." - Albert Einstein

Prof James Hendler				http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~hendler
Tetherless World Constellation Chair
Computer Science Dept
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY 12180

Received on Wednesday, 11 March 2009 04:13:45 UTC