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

At 0:12 -0700 4/19/04, Uschold, Michael F wrote:

[snip]

So let me try another tack on addressing this point.  I have tended 
to be of the view that any/all good ontology engineering best 
practices presented using RDF/OWL will help anyone who wishes to user 
OWL for Semantic Web applications, and thus should be in scope for 
this WG.  However you and Pat have suggested, (on the face of it, 
quite reasonably) that the scope of this group should be more 
strongly WEBBY. This seems like it could be good advice, but w/o any 
criteria for deciding, it is not actionable advice. I hope that you 
(or Pat) can suggest and illustrate useful criteria that can be 
applied to demonstrate examples that are clearly in scope, and those 
that are clearly out. Natasha's example would be good place to start.

Was there anything in Natasha's contribution that was specific to 
with the Web?  (e.g. that explicitly needed and used the features 
that Pat so well described as the 'webby' portions of OWL)? As far as 
I could tell, most or all of the points she made could have been made 
on any number of KR/Ontology languages that pre-dated RDF and OWL. If 
that is so, then by your reckoning, most/all of  her contribution 
would be out of scope. Yet, instead you praise her work highly.

Do you think her contribution is in scope or out of scope? What 
criteria do you use to determine it?


Mike - Natasha's document is entirely about how to resolve the issue 
that the most natural way to represent something in OWL takes you out 
of OWL DL, and how to prvide work arounds should you care about that. 
Seems to me it is completely oriented towards OWL and specific to a 
representational problem that is "epiphenomenal" to OWL (i.e. how to 
use the DL profile correctly if, unlike me, you care).    of course 
it is in scope -- in what way wouldn't it be?

Btw, "in scope" does not mean what I (or you or anyone else) thinks 
we should discuss - in scope refers precisely to what is defined in 
our Working Group charter as approved by the advisory committee of 
the W3C per W3C process.  I strongly suggest everyone reread this 
document -- it's not an informal guideline, it is the specific set of 
rules we agreed to live by when we joined the Working Group - those 
who need to review the process with respect to charters might want to 
look at [1] and those wishing to remind themselves what the charter 
of this working group is (highly recommended) might want to review 
[2].


[1] http://www.w3.org/2004/02/Process-20040205/groups.html#WGCharter
[2] http://www.w3.org/2003/12/swa/swbpd-charter



-- 
Professor James Hendler			  http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler 
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-277-3388 (Cell)