Comment on OWL media type registration draft

I was reading
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2002Nov/0151.html
where Jonathan proposes closing 5.13 
  http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/WebOnt/webont-issues.html#I5.13-Internet-Media-Type-for-OWL
by creating a mime type registration for OWL.

[Speaking for myself, not RDF Core.]

It seems the key aspect that it is recording is the entailment
parameter which has a small set of fixed values:
  simple, RDFS, lite, DL, full (latter being the default)

I was wondering several things:

  * Is this not limiting to the users - how easy is it to create a
    MIME TYPE parameter in a document (I'm thinking of the HTTP-Equiv
    <meta> you have to use in the HTMl family)

  * A fixed list of values seems odd to me from a semantic web
    architecture point of view - don't we use URI(-ref)s?

  * Your list assumes these parameter values are distinct and
    complete; surely there are more subtle relationships between them
    that would have to be put in this registration document?

  * If this is of such general utility would it be better to just add
    this to the RDF mime type draft?  Seems occam's razor applies.

  * If this is such a key requirement, wouldn't it be better to add
    it to the OWL abstract syntax, and consequently the RDF/XML, such
    as a parameter off <rdf:RDF> ?   I was told in personal
    communication that crawlers for some of this data use
    namespaces, file name suffixes to try to guess the appropriate
    semantics. Surely we can do better than that?

    It would seem to benefit from being several layers higher than
      (HTTP say) Content Type parameter
      Content Type
      Transfer Protocol
      File name suffixes, (looking for .owl etc.)
      abstract syntax
    being at the
      concrete syntax
    level where users have more control and can put it in the files
    directly.  

    I'm not even sure how you'd enable people to generate all 5 types
    of entailment on one system using common tools such as apache -
    you'd need five filename suffixes.  And which one would be .owl ?

  * Of course if it was put in <rdf:RDF>, the default would have to
    be RDF entailments, so that would mean OWL would have some more
    boilerplate in the header.

This seems more of a brain dump since this is only a proposal by
Jonathan.

Cheers

Dave

Received on Thursday, 14 November 2002 18:11:08 UTC