Re: PROV-ISSUE-265 (TLebo): RL, why? [Ontology]

Hi Graham,

I really invite you to go back to the minutes of F2F1 and resolution
http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/meeting/2011-07-07#resolution_6

The requirement has always been there, but has not been enforced, till
Ivan made it clear again that it is of critical importance to adoption.

We are seeing that creating a "useful" ontology without taking
this requirement into account makes it hard to "retrofit it" later.

Useful ontology, yes, but please with this requirement in mind.

Regards,
Luc

On 02/24/2012 06:20 AM, Graham Klyne wrote:
> It seems to me that the RL "requirement" is a *way* lesser issue than 
> having a basic model that is easy to generate.
>
> My suggestion would be push ahead with a "useful" ontology that 
> captures a fair richness of provenance, and then later consider what 
> could be traded off for RL compatibility.  But I do feel that 
> expending significant effort on RL compatibility rather than focusing 
> on an usefully descriptive ontology will probably be 
> counter-productive at this stage.
>
> In my experience, a substantial use of OWL ontologies is for 
> documentation and testing purposes, not as part of a live application 
> (though I suppose RL aims to change that?).
>
> #g
> -- 
>
> On 24/02/2012 04:18, Provenance Working Group Issue Tracker wrote:
>> PROV-ISSUE-265 (TLebo): RL, why? [Ontology]
>>
>> http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/track/issues/265
>>
>> 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
>>
>>
>>
>>
>

-- 
Professor Luc Moreau
Electronics and Computer Science   tel:   +44 23 8059 4487
University of Southampton          fax:   +44 23 8059 2865
Southampton SO17 1BJ               email: l.moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk
United Kingdom                     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lavm