Re: Status of OWL 2 Conformance

On 27 May 2009, at 15:43, Jonathan Rees wrote:

> You're asking me to compare wiki version 16385 (Dec 2) to the current
> version (21970), right?
> There are a lot of diffs, and I don't think I can check them all,  
> sorry.
> http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/index.php? 
> title=Conformance&diff=21970&oldid=16385
>
> I do see that the problem I complained about before, that the
> conformance document
> gives no name to any class of ontology documents that satisfy *both*
> syntactic conformance of any kind and datatype conformance, is still
> there.

Is this really a problem? I don't see that it (practically speaking)  
is. The current situation (with some required and a bunch of optional  
datatypes) doesn't seem to be made worse by the lack of such names.  
On the contrary, I've never seen anyone look for such names. People  
just ask if e.g., Pellet supports such and such a datatype.

> The problem is compounded by the fact that datatype conformance is
> only defined for tools, not for documents.

Again, in practice, this has been a nonproblem, and I don't see that  
changing.

> People exchanging ontology documents who want to establish some kind
> of agreement around what's being transmitted

First, there's are lots of agreements people might want to establish.  
So please be precise.

> will have to invent for
> themselves a name for the kind of conformance they need

Uh, no. I don't see that as necessary or likely.

> - i.e.
> syntactic conformance (pick one) plus the use of the OWL 2 datatype
> map - and there's a serious risk they won't even think to do this at
> all,

To no harm.

> and will get confused over exactly what constraints the exchanged
> documents need to conform to.

I don't see why it's a huge deal to say, "We're going to only use  
xsd:decimal" if that's what you want. It's easy to say, communicate,  
detect, etc. Trivial even.

> This seems like a serious source of future headaches to me.

Since it's the current status quo, and this bit hasn't been a source  
of headaches, per se, I'm pretty skeptical that it'll be a source of  
future headaches. I do know that getting into further nomenclature is  
a likely source of current and future headaches (judging from what  
we've experienced).

As a likely "syntax advisory" tool developer, I intend to maintain a  
list of what reasoners support what datatypes and issue warnings  
based on that. It seems more than adequate for the problem, such as  
it is.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Wednesday, 27 May 2009 15:03:50 UTC