exchanging OWL through RIF

• From: Michael Kifer <kifer@cs.sunysb.edu>
• Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 15:03:08 -0500
• To: public-rif-wg@w3.org (RIF WG)
• Message-ID: <27049.1141329788@kiferserv.kiferhome.com>

I am having a second thought about the requirement that OWL should be
exchangeable through RIF by encoding it in FOL (which I am guilty of voting
for also and now attribute it to sleep deprivation :-).

I think this requirement is completely misguided.

RIF is supposed to be a medium to facilitate exchange of rules from
different engines, which use different syntax and semantics.
In contrast, OWL is one and only. It has one syntax and one semantics
(well, three, but each is unique).
To "exchange" OWL specs, one simply needs to send an OWL document to a
partner. There is no need to encode or decode anything.

For interoperability, we will need to be able to send queries to OWL
engines. Representation of those queries will need to be hashed out later.
If encoding will be required there, it would be a very small subset of the
OWL syntax; it has nothing to do with RIF-based exchange of OWL ontologies.


	--michael  

Received on Thursday, 2 March 2006 20:03:17 UTC