Re: [OEP] OWL and Semantic interoperability

for the note is:
>
>This note addresses the role of OWL in overcoming problems of semantic
>heterogeneity.  We briefly characterize what we mean by semantic
>interoperability, and what the challenges are. We describe some OWL
>constructs that are designed to support semantic interoperability and
>illustrate them with examples. We highlight their strengths and
>limitations.  The main message is that OWL is no silver bullet for the
>general problem of achieving semantic interoperability.  The support
>provided is very limited.  Many of these limitations will be overcome by
>the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) that is currently under
>development.

Mike - let me put this in a friendly way -- I don't like this at all. 
First of all, when you compare OWL to any of the alternatives it is 
way better - If you stopped after the sentence "OWL is no silver 
bullet ..." I'd be fine.  However, you go on to say "the support 
provided is very limited" which I don't agree with, and which also is 
a subjective statement at best.  I would even further object to the 
last sentence - first, SWRL has no official status and may not even 
be the eventual choice for a standard, second SWRL has not been 
tested in interoperability issues, and it is unclear to me why more 
expressivity should increase the ability to do reuse -- if anything I 
would actually expect the reverse in practice...
  So let's keep this factual and focused, and leave the hypotheticals 
out of WG notes
  -JH
p.s. And in case anyone is interested, I would like to deny in the 
strongest possible terms that "The support provided (for 
interoperability) in OWL is very limited",  the URI/RDF basis of OWL 
makes the sharing of terms possible in a way that no KR langauge in 
the past has ever had, and is a good part of the reason that OWL is 
now the most used KR langauge in the history of AI.

-- 
Professor James Hendler			  Director, Semantic Web and 
Agent Technologies
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-2696
8400 Baltimore Ave, Suite 200			  301-314-9734 (Fax)
College Park, MD 20742	 		  http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler

Received on Sunday, 6 February 2005 22:55:27 UTC