[OWL-S]: proposal to collapse ProcessModel and Process

I'd like to collapse ProcessModel and Process, in Process.owl.  I doubt 
if anyone will object to this, in principle, but I think it should be 
mentioned "for the record".  It has been discussed, now and then, in the 
past.

ProcessModel has always been a simple class which points to a Process 
and also to a "process control model".  Of course, ProcessControlModel 
is just a placeholder; no one has ever done any work on it (that is, not 
in the context of OWL-S).  (But note that I think there's some important 
work to be done in this area; it's just that it's not a near-term priority.)

"Collapsing" these 2 classes just means: get rid of ProcessModel, and 
replace each reference to ProcessModel with a reference to the 
associated Process. (The ranges of a couple properties will need to be 
changed, from ProcessModel to Process, and a very small number of facts 
will need to be changed in our existing examples.)

There are two motivations for collapsing these two classes: (1) a 
general desire for simplification (streamlining); (2) we're finding that 
this particular simplification has some benefits for the UI of the OWL-S 
editor we're working on.

It was never entirely clear that the existing organization (ProcessModel 
pointing to a Process and a  ProcessControlModel) was intuitively right, 
anyway.  That is, when we do have more to say about "process control", 
the new ontology elements may be directly connected to process classes 
anyway, so there's not a clear need to have this superclass that 
connects Process and ProcessModel.

The only concern that I think might come up here is that some existing 
tools and applications might have to be modified to accommodate this 
proposed change.  But of course they'll have to be modified anyway to 
accommodate more significant changes in the upcoming 1.1 release.

Comments welcome.

-- David

Received on Friday, 11 June 2004 21:07:10 UTC