RE: Relationship between OWL and DAML+OIL

Thanks, Jim. I am glad to hear this. For the time being, it might be useful
to include comment or pointer somewhere in the OWL Web page, or in the
current documents indicating that this changes document is forthcoming. If
it is there already, I missed it.

Mike


 -----Original Message-----
From: 	Jim Hendler [mailto:hendler@cs.umd.edu] 
Sent:	Tuesday, September 10, 2002 6:50 PM
To:	Uschold, Michael F; public-webont-comments@w3.org
Subject:	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
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-731-3822 (Cell)
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler

Received on Wednesday, 11 September 2002 14:49:12 UTC