PROV-ISSUE-266 (TLebo): RL, why? [Ontology]

PROV-ISSUE-266 (TLebo): RL, why? [Ontology]

http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/266

Raised by: Timothy Lebo
On product: Ontology

The very recent and very hard constraint to ensure that PROV-O remains at OWL-RL expressivity is adding a lot of complication to the PROV-O team's ability to complete the ontology. VERY common restrictions that have been around for almost a decade and which provide a lot of insight are NOT permitted in OWL-RL.

>From what I understand, we should stay with OWL-RL so that "it stays simple and people will adopt it". Which people, exactly, will refuse to encode RDF if the corresponding ontology is more expressive than OWL-RL?

I called in when Ivan discussed this at F2F2, and I did NOT get the impression that the rest of the group now seems to have. He seemed to be advocating for the "scruffies", which we had recently named in the meeting. Linked Data is the new direction for the semantic web, and that community could not care less about OWL expressivity. RDF and SPARQL rule the day. There are no OWL reasoners to be found.

I consider myself a member of the Linked Data community, but I also happen to appreciate a well designed OWL ontology. The Linked Data community thinks in terms of classes and predicates. All they care about is which properties lead from which classes and head to which other classes. That's it. Give them some examples and they're off running. Oh, and make your URIs dereferenceable.

So I don't think that the Linked Data community is going to ignore PROV-DM based on its OWL profile.

Are we trying to satisfy some _other_ community? If so, who are they, how many of them are there, what do they do, and what do they like?

Thanks,
Tim

Received on Friday, 24 February 2012 04:20:31 UTC