- From: Chris Welty <cawelty@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2006 13:35:28 -0500
- To: Gerd Wagner <wagnerg@tu-cottbus.de>
- CC: public-rif-wg@w3.org
Gerd Wagner wrote: >> Second there is the issue that the point of this is for >> extensibility. >> In Sandro's "use a small OWL fragment with syntactic sugar" >> proposal we >> can exploit the extensibility of OWL. When an extension needs >> to add new >> productions to an existing abstract syntax node it just >> declares a new >> subclass. That new declaration can be in another self contained OWL >> model and merging the two models is both well defined and >> simple. It's >> not clear to me that either is true of merging in the UML case, but >> perhaps that's a limitation of my knowledge of UML. >> > > Yes, it is. UML provides sophisticated ways of merging packages > (similar to XMLS's possibilities with import and redefine). > In several efforts I was involved in using UML, we ran into *significant* problems with UMLs packaging. Several aspects of the ODM spec, for example, had to be redesigned to account for the failures of the packaging mechanism. Most importantly, UML did not support the ability to add a superclass to a class in an imported package. So you can always extend classes defined in an imported package by specialization, but you cannot generalize. This would be a real problem, IMHO, with using UML for our abstract syntax needs. -Chris -- Dr. Christopher A. Welty IBM Watson Research Center +1.914.784.7055 19 Skyline Dr. cawelty@frontiernet.net Hawthorne, NY 10532 http://www.research.ibm.com/people/w/welty
Received on Thursday, 30 November 2006 13:46:47 UTC