Re: SenseLab note: should flaws in open source ontology editors be mentioned?

One feedback I got for the SenseLab conversion note 
(http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/hcls/notes/senselab/) was that it might be 
inappropriate to mention that flaws in certain popular open source ontology 
editors caused problems for our work. To portions of text in question are:

"""
We experienced the following problems while using RDF/OWL:

The open-source ontology editors used for this project were relatively 
unreliable. A lot of time was spent with steering around software bugs that 
caused instability of the software and errors in the generated RDF/OWL. 
Future versions of freely available editors or currently available 
commercial ontology editors might be preferable. [...]
"""

and

"""
We experienced clear benefits from using Semantic Web technologies for the 
integration of SenseLab data with other neuroscientific data in a 
consistent, flexible and decentralised manner. The main obstacle in our work 
was the lack of mature and scalable open source software for editing the 
complex, expressive ontologies we were dealing with. Since the quality of 
these tools is rapidly improving, this will cease to be an issue in the near 
future.
"""

In my opinion, the errors in one of the most popular OWL ontology editors 
were problematic enough that they need to be mentioned -- I guess most 
people working with non-trivial OWL ontologies know what I mean. What do you 
think?


Cheers,
Matthias Samwald
Semantic Web Company, Austria // DERI Galway, Ireland
http://www.semantic-web.at/
http://www.deri.ie/

Received on Friday, 16 May 2008 07:41:22 UTC