Re: Formal Semantics of OWL + RDF + SPARQL + SWRL

On 12/7/05, Peter F. Patel-Schneider <pfps@research.bell-labs.com> wrote:

> > > I agree that there is the possibility of allowing stores that have different
> > > functionality.  I do not believe, however, that the current vision of the
> > > Semantic Web supports a good way of providing this.
> >
> > Do you have any (links to?) alternative visions which would be more suitable?
>
> You might look at
>
> Peter F. Patel-Schneider. A Revised Architecture for Semantic Web
> Reasoning. Third Workshop on Principles and Practices of Semantic Web
> Reasoning. Dagstuhl, Germany, September 2005. LNCS 3703, Springer Verlag, 2005.
> http://www-db.research.bell-labs.com/user/pfps/publications/architecture.pdf

Thanks Peter. So if I understand correctly, essentially you're
suggesting we use multiple syntaxes, different ones for different
layers of the SW stack.

The only way I can think this might be helpful in maintaining a Web
containing stores of different functionality, would be that they had
very different interfaces. This seems to sidestep the issue of stores
containing identical data responding differently to the same query
(depending on their inference capability), and it also seems contrary
to the conventional wisdom of uniform interfaces being good things. Am
I missing something?

(Looking on your arguments in the paper more generally, I'm afraid the
overarching semantic problems of RDF/triple-based representation of
layers further up the stack aren't as obvious (to me at least) as you
imply in the paper. The concrete syntax issues aren't really a
showstopper when syntax transformation tools are readily available (as
you'd probably agree). As you say in the paper, multiple syntaxes
wouldn't really call for additional work within applications because
they're looking at the model anyway. So on the one hand I can't
actually see the need for multiple syntaxes, on the other wouldn't
really have a problem with working that way...).

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com

Received on Thursday, 8 December 2005 13:14:49 UTC