Re: Review of RDFTM Survey

> | Finally, can the WG notes refer to results from proprietary products
> | (such as some of the solutions that are only hinted at in the papers
> | and are implemented inside Ontopia products)?
>
> Why not, really? I mean that seriously. What's the problem?

I guess I would like to have some official guidance on that. Ralph, 
Guus, David, any opinions? Search for the two places where "Ontopia 
Knowledge Suite" is mentioned in the document [1].

Regardless of the guidance on that, what probably raised a red flag for 
me was the way it was mentioned. Something like "Garshol sketches some 
solutions for the tricky cases along the lines of X, which has since 
been implemented in the Ontopia Knowledge Suite". However, unlike for 
all the other approaches, there are no details of how these tricky 
questions are addressed. Given that this is the whole point of the 
note, this lack of detail is a concern. Basically, if it is a simple 
omission (which I am almost sure it is), then this is an easy fix. If 
you cannot provide details for proprietary reasons, then I think 
putting a plug for the tool could be problematic. Again, some help from 
people more familiar with W3C processes would be appreciated.

> | In section 3.3.1, the paragraph that starts with "Interestingly,
> | what appears to be a very opaque RDF" seems very subjective. I would
> | suggest removing it.
>
> I think this is just a matter of wording. The observation is sound
> enough, but it could perhaps be reworded to make it seem more
> objective.

I agree.

> | I would be careful about statements like the following in section
> | 3.6: "superset of the most popular proposed semantic web metamodels
> | (viz XML, RDF, and Topic Maps)". I doubt we want any document coming
> | out ot this WG to refer to XML as a semantic web metamodel, do we?
>
> Personally, I don't see the problem, given that the statement is
> obviously true. I do realize there's a potential political problem
> here, though, so official guidance would be nice.

Well, I think having "semantic" and "XML" in the same sentence is just 
too contentious and I am pretty sure others in this group would agree 
(if not argue more forcefully). XML is used a syntax for many SW 
languages, but calling it a "semantic web metamodel" is probably a 
stretch, since it doesn't have any explicit semantics.

> | A naive question: RDF has metamodeling capabilities: a class can be
> | an instance of another class. Is a similar think available in Topic
> | Maps?
>
> It is, in exactly the same way.

Good - so, it's not an issue.

> | Minor point: where available, it would have been helpful to have
> | URLs for references, particularly for the ones that are solely web
> | documents, such as various reports from Ontopia.
>
> I guess you've read this on paper, because whenever the documents have
> URLs the titles are links to the web versions of the papers. Maybe the
> URLs should be shown explicitly in the text for those who read on
> paper. I see other W3C documents do this.

I feel so silly now :) Indeed, I read it on paper (it's 35 pages, hard 
to read on screen), and it hasn't occurred to me that these would be 
links :) so I just used google. Indeed, putting URLs in the reference 
would be helpful, and I think is a reasonably common practice,

Natasha

Received on Wednesday, 2 March 2005 18:28:41 UTC