Re: Schism in the Semantic Web community.

Hello,

Olivier Rossel wrote:
> I am currently having a look at new features available in OWL2 (thanks
> for property chains :).
> But I am quite frustrated to see that only OWLAPI handles OWL2 at the moment.
> No short-term plan for Jena to support it.
> No idea if Swoop or Protege3-OWL will ever be upgraded to support it.

OWL 2 has many interesting features and I'd also like to see as much
tool support for it as possible. However, currently the specification
has the status of a working draft, i.e. it is still half a year(?) away
from an official W3C recommendation.

That said there is already tool support. The OWL API is always quite
close to the current OWL 2 working draft and Protege 4 is based on the
OWL API. Hence, it also supports OWL 2. Some reasoners already have
support for OWL 2 including FaCT++ and Pellet. The OWL 2 profiles
attracted some interest: CEL is a reasoner for the EL profile, Owlgres
and QuOnto support the OWL 2 Lite profile. Oracle 11g has support for
the OWL 2 R profile and they have shown that they can reason over
millions of triples in the LUBM benchmark. I guess that Virtuoso, which
is more established in the Semantic Web community, also has a strong
interest to support the R profile in the future.

> OWLAPI does not manage semantic web at the statement level.
> Jena was one of the few libraries to be both statement-based and concept-based.
> Basically, i would say that Jena was the only API to glue the RDF
> world and the OWL world together.
> And because of that, it had been adopted by developpers as a
> "one-size-fits-all" library.
> And by RDF database vendors as their API for their RDF storage system.
> 
> This makes me wonder:
> What will happen in the next future?
> Will we see a schism between RDF tools, and OWL tools?
> Virtuoso vs OwlGres?
> 
> I think it is good that the Semantic Web has always keeped that
> internal competition between statements
> and boxes. But if tools support is splitted, then what? Two
> communities? Mass storage vs inference? A crucial
> tools choice to make in any IT project? Then we are back in the vendor
> lock-in nightmare.
> 
> Well, this is quite a rough reflexion.
> Please comment.
> 
> 
> 


-- 
Dipl. Inf. Jens Lehmann
Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig
Homepage: http://www.jens-lehmann.org
GPG Key: http://jens-lehmann.org/jens_lehmann.asc

Received on Friday, 9 January 2009 14:16:09 UTC