- From: Guus Schreiber <schreiber@cs.vu.nl>
- Date: Wed, 09 Feb 2005 19:32:22 +0100
- To: "Uschold, Michael F" <michael.f.uschold@boeing.com>
- CC: SWBPD list <public-swbp-wg@w3.org>
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 -- Free University Amsterdam, Computer Science De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands Tel: +31 20 598 7739/7718 E-mail: schreiber@cs.vu.nl Home page: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~guus/
Received on Wednesday, 9 February 2005 18:32:29 UTC