Re: XG W3pm Scope

Matthew West wrote:

> Sorry guys, but I think this is putting the cart before the horse.
>
> First I think we need to understand the area we are looking at. It may well exceed the limitations of any DL.
>
> Then we should look at which useful DL subsets there are that can be exploited by various tools.

I strongly disagree.  First you must know the purpose you have in mind 
for creating these models in this XG.
You already had models in EXPRESS to address the sorts of things 
described by Michel in his scope document. 
This group was formed because some set of folks wanted to do this in 
RDFS/OWL.   There can be different
reasons for wanting to do that.  If a primary reason was to support 
reasoning with Description Logic tools, that
effects what and how you define things in your models.  If you don't 
care about that, you will have more
freedom.  But you will have made a choice.  Certain design decisions 
will make DL compatibility quite
difficult, and some of those choices were already suggested today!  
(none of this is to say that we don't need
understand the area we are looking at)

I wasn't saying that you have to go the DL route.  I was merely 
cautioning that you should understand your
goals before blindly making decisions that may be implicitly undermining 
those goals.  It would also be
helpful to me, as someone who represents the "manufacturing"* community 
in the OWL WG, to know how
people from our community want to use the language.  Decisions are made 
every week in OWL WG changing
the language design.  I have a perspective on the needs of our domain 
with respect to OWL, but I am also
interested in other perspectives from folks motivated enough to work in 
this XG.

* I am using the term "manufacturing" to broadly refer to design, 
planning, construction/production, etc. of
man-made artifacts.  It's the term we tend to use in the Manufacturing 
Engineering Laboratory :-D .

-Evan

Evan K. Wallace
Manufacturing Systems Integration Division
NIST

Received on Friday, 30 May 2008 19:59:12 UTC