Re: [OEP] OWL and Semantic interoperability

Mike, all,

I sympathize with Jim's remarks. A few points:

- In the discussion the term "limitation" gets a negative connotation, 
which I think is incorrect as a general statement. I like the German 
adagium "In der Beschraenkung zeigt sich der Meister" (poor man's 
translation: the master shows herself in the limitations/restrictions 
she imposes". OWL is a reasonable set of limitations, with the caveats 
already pointed out by Alan. Of those, only QCRs can really be viewed as 
a "design error"; numeric constraints were left out on purpose as they 
can in principle be handled with datatypes (see the XSD TF); numeric 
calculations are out because we deliberately focused on the static 
aspects. If we hadn't kept to that limitation we would still be busy 
working on OWL. We all expect a rule language to be able to handle that.

- The big plus of RDF/OWL is a simple one: its XML-based syntax which 
makes it easy to share (meta)data. This echoes also in the summary of 
Pat's points. People do not have to worry about formats and can start 
building information-integration applications, cf. the 18 submissions to 
the Semantic Web Challenge of this year. Yes, these are simple 
applications, and most of them do hardly any reasoning. Still, people 
went out and did useful stuff that was more difficult before. And most 
of them where using a very "limited" language, RDF Schema).

Guus


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Received on Wednesday, 9 February 2005 18:32:29 UTC