Re: Relationship between OWL and DAML+OIL

At 4:55 PM -0400 9/10/02, Uschold, Michael F wrote:
>Everyone,
>
>One goal of the release of OWL is to make it easy for people to understand
>it and respond to it. A substantial portion of people who will be reading
>these documents will already be familiar with DAML+OIL. There should be NO
>NEED for these people to be forced to read descriptions that are essentially
>identical to DAML+OIL.  It is a slow painful process figuring out what is
>different from DAML+OIL. Frankly, I cannot afford the time to pour over  the
>full documentation in any detail, even just the feature summary.   What I
>would like is to be able to spend no more than an hour, and possible as few
>as 15 minutes, to get a grasp of the essence of OWL.  The best way to do
>this is to provide a summary of changes from DAML+OIL to OWL.   Such a
>document could dramatically improve the number of people who take the time
>to respond to the proposal. I would expect that tool developers would find
>this particularly useful also. 
>
>Last night, I asked Ian Horrocks what were the key differences, what I
>learned was:
>
>*	OWL and DAML+OIL to a first approximation are the same. There are
>some cosmetic changes, and there are some minor technical differences.  For
>example:
>o	Improved names that say exactly what they mean, instead of being
>semantically opaque geek-speak.: e.g. allValuesFrom and someValuesFrom
>rather than toClass and has-class. 
>o	no qualified cardinalities-there was no business case defending
>their need, very hard to understand, and difficult to implement.
>
>I recommend that someone put together such a document that would probably
>only be a few pages long and would be the first place to look hat 
>would probably
>only be a few pages long and would be the first place to look for someone
>wanting a quick understanding of what is new about OWL.  A longer and more
>useful document might be constructed which would contain sufficient detail
>so that a tool developer who had already developed full support for DAML+OIL
>could use that as a changes specification and checklist for updating the
>implementation. They would need only read this document, and any relevant
>portions of the full reference documents.  Ideally, they should not even
>have to look at the other portions of the documentation.
>
>Perhaps there already is an intention to produce this?
>
>Mike Uschold

Mike, thanks for your comments - we are currently working on this - 
Mike Dean will add a section to the reference document with the 
specific changes, and I expect either the guide documents or others 
to mention critical changes.


-- 
Professor James Hendler				  hendler@cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
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Received on Tuesday, 10 September 2002 21:50:12 UTC