Re: [OEP] public comment

Dear Peter,

> (Apologies in advance for the potential misuse of the mailing for
> providing public comment. I'm not a member of the WG, but I failed to
> locate a public comment mailing list.)

Actually, no need to apologize: this list is exactly the place to send 
public comments.

> In every case, the advantages and disadvantages of various approaches
> have been discussed and then a decision was made for one or the other.
> For example, in the EU FP5 project On-To-Knowledge we settled for
> Approach 2, except that we used our own property called isAbout 
> (instead
> of dc:subject) and added the rule that
>
> (Doc, isAbout, A) and (A, rdfs:subClassOf, B) -> (Doc, isAbout, B)
>
> which provided the missing piece of inference (not expressible in OWL
> DL, as rightly noted in the document).

Or OWL Full for that matter. However, this is an interesting point, and 
perhaps adding this possibility as one of the bullet points for 
approaches 2 and 3 would make sense. I'll do that for the next version 
and see what other say.

> Despite that the note is a clear and important summary of these
> discussions and is, for example, already read with interest by members
> of the EU FP6 SEKT project, I personally have the feeling that merely
> listing the various approaches that one can take does not go far enough
> when it comes to the Semantic Web.
>
> Within a project or in a closed community one may choose any
> representation that he sees fit as long as it's agreed, but the case of
> the Semantic Web is somewhat different. I suggest that this group 
> should
> consider what happens if we allow people to choose from these options 
> at
> will and annotate their content correspondingly. If I let my crawler 
> out
> on the Semantic Web, how is it going to figure out on the first place
> which approach is being used? (Especially with the multiple
> interpretations given to dc:subject...) Is it still possible then to
> integrate metadata created with the different approaches? What are the
> translation rules for that?
>
> In summary, I have the feeling that the level of commitment this
> document represents is still too low to build an interoperable Semantic
> Web of content and annotations. My suggestion to the group is to either
> (1) limit the choices further or (2) to describe the ways to identify
> the various approaches and how to make them interoperable (translate
> them to one another) with minimal loss of semantics.

You have a point there, and others have raised similar issues [1], [2]. 
I am not sure (1) is a feasible option though -- see my reply to Brian 
today. On (2) indeed translations between patterns would be helpful. 
Short of providing the translation tools themselves what type of 
information should we provide in the note to enable  tool developers to 
write conversions?

Natasha

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swbp-wg/2004May/0105.html

[2]http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swbp-wg/2004May/0124.html

Received on Friday, 4 June 2004 02:38:04 UTC