Re: Discussion: OWL-S and Industry Adoption

Josh --

Let me say that it would be great to see any respectable form of 
computational logic make it into the commercial big time.

The machine-oriented syntax of OWL and its relatives seems to be a major 
hindrance.  It's painful to read, and near impossible to write correctly.

Even its originators seem to agree.  To quote Ian Horrocks in a recent 
posting, "no sane person would write directly in OWL/SWRL/SWRL FOL syntax" 
.  He goes on to suggest that  "we can therefore safely leave it to tool 
builders to add convenience features as they see fit" .

I'd suggest that such a "disconnected" approach is a key part of the 
commercial adoption problem.

A different, but still logic-based approach to commercialization is in the 
"e-Government Presentation" at www.reengineeringllc.com .  There's an 
online system at the same site that illustrates the approach.

                                 Cheers,  -- Adrian


Adrian Walker
Reengineering LLC
PO Box 1412
Bristol
CT 06011-1412 USA

Phone: USA 860 583 9677
Cell:    USA  860 830 2085
Fax:    USA  860 314 1029


At 06:24 AM 11/30/2004 +0000, you wrote:
>Last week I attended a semantic web seminar hosted by Eric Miller, who is 
>a Semantic Web Activity Lead for the W3C, and we started to discuss the 
>future of OWL-S and why it seemed that the industry (chiefly commercial 
>interests) have been slow to adopt semantic web services.  By "slow" we 
>were comparing how OWL-S does not seem to have the same transition from 
>more of a research/academic initiative to more commercial implemenations 
>as seen with RDF and OWL.  As such we figured it would be best to open up 
>a discussion as to why this is, and how to spur the transition as well as 
>to allow people to comment freely on OWL-S.  Here is a list a questions 
>and statements that may help jumpstart the conversation:
>
>This OWL-S standard is still a W3C submission.  Is it still to early to 
>discuss the viability of OWL-S before it becomes a 
>recommendation?  Perhaps many are still trying to digest the specifications?
>
>Are there not enough concrete examples/documentation for users to follow, 
>and help expose the benefit of semantically describing a web service?
>
>Are the good examples that do exist not given enough publicity, and a 
>convenient way to search for them?
>
>Are there not enough tools to help automate the process of semantically 
>describing a web service?
>
>Are there other standards or emerging technologies that overlap with 
>OWL-S, and lessen its importance?
>
>
>These are just a few questions to start on, but please feel free to 
>comment on any aspect of this topic.  The goal is to create some 
>excitement, and realization of the importance of OWL-S.  Thanks for your 
>time, and thoughts
>
>Josh Grob
>BBN Technologies
>Software Engineer
>10 Moulton Street
>Cambridge, MA 02138
>
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 30 November 2004 17:39:56 UTC