New use case - RDFS/OWL related

I'm not sure if this is a WD comment from an outsider (since I wasn't 
a member when the WD went out) or a suggestion from a new member (as 
I now am on the DAWG), but I would like to suggest that we add 
another use case to the document.  I think it is an important class 
of query that was completely ignored in the current draft (esp. as 
FOAF is rapidly becoming one of the most used Sem Web things, and 
this would refer to it).

  In processing an RDFS schema or an OWL ontology that cites a term in 
another ontology, c.f.
        me:Lilah a cyc:cat,
I want to know what restrictions the cited graph has for this class 
-- i.e. in this example, I want to ask
  cyc: for those triples of the form where the class definition 
includes a restriction (I'll spare you the gory details now, easy to 
generate) so I can process the triples appropriately, etc.


I think it would be a valuable use case to publish as it is quite 
likely to come up quite often as, for example, FOAF and the like 
take-off, and people want to be able to process new data (i.e. go to 
the schema, see whether the new property "foaf:dnaCheckSum" we 
haven't seen before is inverse-functional) - I should note that I 
assume that the serialized graph of a number of important ontologies 
and schemas will be available on the Semantic Web (it is already 
happening for a number of them) and thus doing this by query of an 
RDF graph, rather than HTTP-GET of the document (which could be very 
large - the NCI ontology document, for example, is >25M) will be much 
more efficient.

I believe it will be easy to make this a use case in the form the 
UC&R document uses (something like: A social network site is 
processing people's data based on foaf data that was dumped from a 
different social networking site.  It encounters a property it has 
not previously encountered so it queries a schema server to see 
whether this property has restrictions that would effect later 
processing of the data ...)

I don't think this new use case would add any requirements or 
objectives, however I do think it makes a strong case for some of the 
existing ones (3.1, 3.4, 3.7, 4.2, 4.3) and is also an important one 
in that it helps to demonstrate that the DAWG's work is important for 
RDFS and OWL, not just RDF DBs.

  -Jim H.


-- 
Professor James Hendler			  http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-277-3388 (Cell)

Received on Monday, 7 June 2004 12:57:13 UTC