RE: philosophy of SWBPD (was Re: [OPEN] and/or [PORT] : a practical question)

Hello,


Jim Hendler wrotes

>In case anyone hasn't figured it out by now - I THINK IT SHOULD BE 
>OUT OF SCOPE FOR THIS TASK FORCE TO WRITE ONTOLOGY ENGINEERING 
>DOCUMENTS HAT ARE NOT RELATED TO THE SEMANTIC WEB as part of this 
>Working Group.  If you'd like me to state it clearer, let me know 
> what to addd

Do i understand well what you want to say :
	You think that, according to the formal definition of the term
"Ontology", building an ontology doesn't automatically mean that you are
in the SW context ? 
	
	If it is what you mean i completely agree with that because  i
think that , like Mr LAPALICE, we have been building Ontology since, as
you say, 50 years without knowing it

But you also write :

> They ARE central to the design of OWL, in the sense that OWL is 
> specifically FOR the Web, and thus had to have a few things that 
> typical KR/O languages lack.


Do I have to understand that what i have written above is false if I use
OWL (RDFS ?)? In other word if i use OWL/RDFS i'm automatically in the
SW context (SWC) ? i think i can agree with that, but let me ask a more
precise question :

			- Do you think that a use case (i don't want to
use the word application) where somebody uses OWL ontologies without
REASONING TASKS (classification, individuals retrieval, etc...)is still
a SW use case ?

			- if yes :
				this raises a few  very correlated new
questions :
				- can we make a clear distinction
between an OWL ontology built outside the context of SWC and an OWL
ontology in the SWC ?
				- Are we able to define two distinct
guidelines, both for OWL but
						- one for the more
general OEC (which is clearly not our objective)
						- one for the specific
SWC ?
				- In other word, (it's always the same
question but more precise i think) : what are the differences between
SWC and OEC ?
					
			- if not :
				to what context does it belong ? the
general Ontology engineering context (OEC) i suppose ? And in this case
do you think that these contexts have such a little intersection in
terms of guidelines that there is no need for us to explore in details
the OEC ?
			For me the direct consequence of this negative
response is that the very "heavy" criteria (the only one perhaps ) to
definitively distinguish the 2 contexts is  the fact we need/use or not
some reasoning tasks. 

Don't you think that by accepting this point of view, which is perhaps
too much restrictive, we could have a simple "bodyguard" or (meta)
guideline or whatever you want which could say to us :

		All the advices, guidelines,...we are going to write
MUST be thought keeping this following final objective in the mind : our
outputs MUST help people to build, in a given context, the best
(distributed) architecture (i.e ontologies could be only a - very
important - part of it) to allow some very specific reasoning tasks.

I'm afraid that taking this point of view means that we have to kwow for
the overall SWA lifecycle all the points which can have a real impact in
REASONING capabilities. It's a hard work but perhaps that it is easier
than the problem to say if this point or this point has to deal with OEC
or SWC ?


You will have understood that, my personal point of view is to make such
simplification in our approach. Not perhaps this one exactly which is, i
must admit, very very restrictive (and perhaps false ? glurps!!!) but
which has the merit to define precise criterias to select the point to
study.

Thank you very much

best regards

Marco NANNI