RE: Schism in the Semantic Web community.

Hi



I am not so worried about a schism.
In Virtuoso, we support selected OWL features, such as owl:sameAs, identity
of subjects if they share an inverse functional property value,
transitivity, equivalent classes and properties.  Some of these are already
in version 5, things like IFP's and transitivity in the upcoming 6.

These are discussed on the Virtuoso blog 

http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/blog

Specially see the E Pluribus Unum and Scalable Inference on Demand posts.
We discuss there how we avoid materializing entailed triples in many RDFS
and OWL inference cases.

The OWL support will evolve as needed.  Our emphasis is on relatively simple
inference with  unlimited data, including efficiently running on clusters.
The latter has some engineering implications since algorithms must deal with
latency, which is not an issue with single process in memory situations.

As for programming interfaces, we support Jena and Sesame API's in addition
to the SPARQL protocol and all our SQL API's.  The choice is yours, we are
neutral as concerns API preferences.



Orri




-----Original Message-----
From: semantic-web-request@w3.org [mailto:semantic-web-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Jens Lehmann
Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 3:38 PM
To: semantic-web@w3.org
Subject: Re: Schism in the Semantic Web community.



Hello Olivier,

Jens Lehmann wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
[...]
> 
>> 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.

(Sorry, that I send my first mail too early accidently.) I wanted to add
that you are hitting an interesting spot here. I agree that RDF and OWL
tools and - even more important - their communities should not be too
separated. However, I believe that the upcoming OWL 2 standard does not
have a negative impact here. Every OWL 2 ontology can be mapped to RDF
and vice versa. Furthermore, OWL 2 has been extended to simplify tool
support and solve some practival problems, e.g. the specification is now
accompanied by UML diagrams, axioms can be annotated, entities can be
used as instances and classes through punning etc. Summed up, I believe
that if there will be a split between OWL and RDF communities (which we
should avoid), then - from my point of view - this is unlikely to be the
fault of the upcoming OWL 2 standard.

Kind regards,

Jens

-- 
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 Saturday, 10 January 2009 07:57:44 UTC