Re: Options we have with respect to the draft charters (i.e., RE: [fwd] Draft charters for work on Semantics for WS)

Quoting Bijan Parsia <bparsia@isr.umd.edu>:

> (By way of refutation to your bromide about complexity and users, I'll
> point out that XML schema is definitely more complex than OWL (by many
> measures, including computational complexity) and more widely used. So,
> eh.)

I'm not convinced that that is true in practice.  Yes, XML Schemas
include the datatypes, and are tricky anyway in parts, so if someone
to learn all of XML Schemas and all of OWL, Schemas might well be more
complex.

But with OWL, you'll also have to learn a some RDF,
and usually RDF/XML, and perhaps even XML Schema datatypes.

Anyway, I had to learn a fair amount about both a while back
(I wrote some software that turns Java class definitions into
XML Schemas, Relax NG schemas, or OWL ontologies), and learning
enough to do that (plus a bit more) was about equally hard for
XML Schemas and OWL.  (Relax NG easily won against both.)

(A nice thing about this as an example is that it corresponds
to learning enough for a wide range of "data" uses for the
schemas or ontologies.)

But I was doing something somewhat tricky with schemas.
If I'd put a few restrictions on my XML instead, I could
have learned enough less so that it would have been
noticeably easier than the OWL.

The point is that, for many purposes, learning enough of
XML Sxchemas will be easier than learning enough OWL.

-- Jeff

Received on Tuesday, 22 November 2005 00:21:25 UTC