ACTION review of ODL draft

> 5. ODM / UML ONTOLOGY PROFILE
> 
> See Evan's message:
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swbp-wg/2004Sep/0044.html
> 
> Comments from SWBPD?  Any updates from Guus, BenB or Gary?

I Looked at the draft ODM spec"

   http://www.omg.org/docs/ontology/04-08-01.pdf

A big plus compared to (some of the) earlier drafts is that the
ODM covers OWL Full and not just OWL DL. Otherwise, the ODM would be of
limited use for users who prefer either RDF Schema or OWL Full.

I've been reading mainly Chs. 5, 7 and 8.  Ch. 5 contains a very
readable informal description of the matches and mismatches between
the expressivity of UML and OWL. It shows the authors have a high
level of understanding of OWL and RDF Schema (e.g. see the remark on
p. 27 about the relation between "classifier" in UML and
subclasses/properties in RDF/OWL).  I can recommend this chapter as an
instructive read for people interested in the UML-RDF/OWL
relationship.

Chs. 7 and 8 specify resp. the RDF Schema and OWL metamodels as a MOF
M2 model. Properties are represented with MOF classes and not as
associations. This makes sense, because of the first-class nature of
properties in RDF/OWL. (Note: Ch. 5, p. 26 seems to suggest simple
binary properties should be modeled as a MOF Association.)

All major RDF/OWL constructs (class, property, resource/individual,
literal) are represented as M2 classes. I'm not a MOF expert, but this
suggests to me that the graphical representation as a UML Profile will
not be very distinctive/intuitive. On the other hand, it is hard to
see an alternative.

Overall, I'm happy with the draft as it stands. At the moment I see no
compelling reasons for change requests.

Guus


-- 
Free University Amsterdam, Computer Science
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Tel: +31 20 444 7739/7718
E-mail: schreiber@cs.vu.nl
Home page: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~guus/

Received on Thursday, 14 October 2004 16:57:42 UTC