RE: Objective 4.6 -- additional semantic information

At 17:44 -0700 6/9/04, Rob Shearer wrote:
>>  I think you missed my point - I was asking what you think objective
>>  4.6 adds - from the above I would assume you advocate removing this
>>  objective, is that right?  If not, what would it mean to have what
>>  4.6 says but not to have the ability to do RDFS or OWL inferencing?
>
>I did object to an early phrasing of this requirement, which I
>interpreted as making RDFS and OWL inferencing part of the RDF querying
>specificiation.
>
>I suggested a rewording of the requirement which expresses an admittedly
>vague goal: the ability to define future variants or applications of the
>language which might be used for querying RDFS, OWL, and future
>languages like SWRL. I think there is value in this as an objective in
>its own right, and I think it is realistic given my own experience
>developing an OWL query language which built around an RDF querying
>language core.
>
>If the issue is really so contentious and we can't find words to express
>such a vague goal, then I suppose we can live without any mention of
>other semantic languages.

I like the objective, I just want to get it stated clearly -- I can 
imagine an "extension" mechanism for doing this and, once again 
citing the charter, I see we are expected to take this into account 
(i.e. section 1.6 reads:
"Many items ruled out of scope by this charter require an 
extensibility mechanism for later implementation. This mechanism must 
allow for arbitrary combinations of orthogonal extensions."

So I think we actually have a mini-consensus (i.e. you and me) 
reached that we like the intent of this clause (your vague goal), but 
think we need to reword it -- let's work on that and see if we can 
make it clearer.  I do think it very important we refer to RDFS and 
OWL in this document (I'm much less convinced about SWRL, but we can 
argue that elsewhere) -- that's because those Recs do layer on RDF 
and IMO it is important we make it clear that this WG has considered 
those uses as well.
  -JH
p.s. sorry to keep quoting the charter all the time, but as a former 
WG chair it was beaten into me by my team contact and is now a bad 
habit :->



-- 
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)