RE: [SE] OOSD note

Hello all

Two remarks on this vey interesting note

1. I already made a comment about the definition of OWL classes as "sets" of individuals
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swbp-wg/2005Oct/0045.html
No answer so far, but I see it has been included in the OO/OWL comparison table, so ...

2. [TODO: Possibly also include screenshots of other tools (Cerebra has been suggested) -
I welcome contributions -- hk]
Maybe it would be worth considering the new Altova tool Semanticworks
http://www.altova.com/products_semanticworks.html
The interesting thing is that this tool has been developed as part of an XML toolkit,
which makes it quite different of Protégé or SWOOP. The GUI will sound familiar to users
of XMLSpy, but quite weird to Protégé users. I've downloaded and tried it a bit. There
seems to remain quite a bunch a bugs in this early version, but worth looking at anyway.
To many people in this group, it will be strange to see how it handles "ontology
validation", which IMO seems to look more like an XML schema validation. "Validation" of
files edited under Protégé and SWOOP gives strange bunches of "errors", and if you edit
them, you get of course yet another serialization. I had already experienced that kind of
problems between Protégé and SWOOP, so it is not big news :))

This leads me to note that maybe there is something misleading in section 3.1

"RDF just defines the very basic syntax for Semantic Web content, and has an XML
serialization that allows users to share models on the Web."

It would be more honest to point that RDF has *many* XML serializations, and that the same
set of triples can be expressed in an unbound variety of syntaxes, none of them being
canonical, and which are likely to become arbitrarily complex for large RDF graphs (which
I stick to think is a major issue for wide adoption and interoperability). So maybe the
document should include somewhere that tools editors should be aware of issues raised by
this very variety of syntaxes, and that "conformant" RDF tools (which somehow handle
internally the semantics of RDF) are bound to exchange RDF not only with each other, but
with more loosy applications which will rely more on XML structure than on underlying RDF
semantics, and of which RDF parsers are likely to be less tolerant to exotic
serializations.

My concern here is that this group should make the community aware of the risk of building
software environments able to use only on a specific, and de facto "proprietary" RDF
serialization. Now that we begin to have a variety of RDF tools coming to the market from
various backgrounds, it would be good to address real life interoperability issues, like
"Can I edit an ontology exported from Protégé into SWOOP, Altova Semanticworks ... and
send it back to Protégé without loosing anything?". Maybe this is not exactly in the scope
of this note, but seems somehow related.

Bernard


----------------------------------
Bernard Vatant
Mondeca Knowledge Engineering
bernard.vatant@mondeca.com
(+33) 0871 488 459

http://www.mondeca.com
http://universimmedia.blogspot.com
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> -----Message d'origine-----
> De : public-swbp-wg-request@w3.org
> [mailto:public-swbp-wg-request@w3.org]De la part de Jeff Z. Pan
> Envoyé : vendredi 7 octobre 2005 16:24
> À : public-swbp-wg@w3.org
> Cc : Phil Tetlow; Holger Knublauch
> Objet : [SE] OOSD note
>
>
>
> Hi all,
>
> The OOSD note is now available from the SETF homepage.
>
> http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/SE/ODSD/
>
> Greetings,
> Jeff
>
> --
> Jeff Z. Pan (http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/~jpan/)
> Department of Computing Science, The University of Aberdeen
>
>
>
>
>
>

Received on Saturday, 8 October 2005 10:04:29 UTC