- From: Libby Miller <Libby.Miller@bristol.ac.uk>
- Date: Mon, 5 Apr 2004 09:35:49 +0100 (BST)
- To: David Norheim <david@asemantics.com>
- Cc: "McBride, Brian" <brian.mcbride@hp.com>, Jim Hendler <hendler@cs.umd.edu>, SWBPD <public-swbp-wg@w3.org>, NANNI Marco FTRD/DMI/SOP <marco.nanni@francetelecom.com>
On Mon, 5 Apr 2004, David Norheim wrote: > > > > > [...] > > > >> So, for me the most important thing we have to do is to > >> convince the reader that OWL is a good language and that he > >> migth uses it as much as possible. Obviously the > >> demonstration will based on some comparisons betwen the > >> languages but always, in my mind, according to the fact that > >> OWL is the most powerful one. > > > > At breakfast this morning, I used a chain saw to take the top off my > > boiled > > egg, as it was the most powerful tool I had available. Shame I didn't > > have > > one of those loud pneumatic road digger thingies :) > > > > Seriously, though, the point I want to make is that there is a notion > > of > > appropriateness of a tool to a task. It may be that there are no > > tasks for > > which RDFS is more appropriate that Owl, but perhaps that is something > > to > > examine rather than assume. > > > > Brian > > > > Very good point Brian. Similar arguments have proven that SOAP/WSDL is > not the ideal tool for ALL public web services (as HTTP with simple XML > may be most appropriate in lots of cases). > > We could try to approach cases from bottom up, and try to see if we > then find limitations in the technology for the specific task that will > make us need to take one step higher in the "semantic cake". We then be > able to point this out rather than jump to the most complex technology > first. > > I would like to see us describe a list of use cases where it is clear > that the "least complex" technology is appropriate, rather than the > most powerful. Gradually we keep on moving up the stack, when we reach > more and more complex problems that would *require* OWL. We should also > comparing them with other known technologies like RDBMS, XML and Web > Services to show that the latter ones are inappropriate (if so). Also > point out what you lose by not using the higher layers in SW. > > Use cases to start from could be as easy as > > 1. News summaries, e.g. RDF site summary (RSS). Clearly "simple" enough > to only use RDF + DC (hence RSS 1.0), but regardless of what we may > think (?), also appropriate to use XML (RSS 2.0). But what problems > arises with use of XML instead of RDF? (e.g. Unique identification). > What do you lose by not using OWL? > > 2. Personal information, e.g. vCard, FOAF... What makes RDF appropriate > here? Why is FOAF problems simple enough for RDF(S), and when do we > need to introduce OWL? FOAF uses OWL - in particular, inverseFunctionalProperty, which we need to avoid using uris for people (instead, homepage or mbox or mbox_sha1sum are used to indirectly identify people). Libby > > ...and then move to more and more complex. > > - David > > >
Received on Monday, 5 April 2004 04:39:00 UTC