Re: "Real OWL" on the Web

On 15/4/09 14:41, Mark Wallace wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> In my experience (it may be too limited) I see a lot of "real RDF" on
> the web, especially in things like FOAF, and Dbpedia. But I am not aware
> of much "real OWL" on the web, and by this I mean OWL-DL ontologies and
> knowledge bases, embedded in web pages, and systems that reason over
> such information. Now I know many folks are hosting ontologies at HTTP
> URLs. This is not what I am talking about. I am thinking more of OWL-DL
> statements out there like FOAF is now, and systems that crawl (?) and
> reason over the combined knowledge.

A quick comment -
Whenever people do identity reasoning with FOAF data (eg. Sindice, 
Garlik/Qdos) this is reasoning using properties like foaf:homepage, 
foaf:mbox etc whose semantics are documented using (real!) OWL. Whether 
or not a general purpose OWL inference engine is used at runtime is 
pretty secondary. OWL is a data formats standard, just as RDF is - how 
you compute with that data is a pragmatic choice. Any vocabulary or 
dataset (eg. DOAP, SIOC) that is mixed up with FOAF in terms of linked 
classes and properties, is also partially documented using OWL. So I 
guess I disagree with any attempt to contrast "real world" FOAF / RDF 
deployment with "non-real" OWL deployment. Or with the idea that the 
only real OWL work is OWL-DL...

cheers,

Dan

--
http://danbri.org/

Received on Wednesday, 15 April 2009 12:54:11 UTC