Re: Schism in the Semantic Web community.

Hello Jeremy,

First, let me disclaim that this is a personal comment, and not one
that represents the view of the WG.

But I wonder whether you and the other readers of this thread have
noticed the bit in test and conformance that states:

2.1 Document Conformance
Several syntaxes have been defined for OWL 2 ontology documents, some
or all of which could be used by OWL 2 tools for exchanging documents.
However, conformant OWL 2 tools that take ontology documents as
input(s) must accept ontology documents using the RDF/XML
serialization [OWL 2 Mapping to RDF Graphs], and conformant OWL 2
tools that publish ontology documents must, if possible, be able to
publish them in the RDF/XML serialization if asked to do so (e.g., via
HTTP content negotiation). OWL 2 tools may also accept and/or publish
ontology documents using other serializations, for example the XML
Serialization [OWL 2 XML Syntax].

Quickly summarizing: OWL 2 conformant tools must both accept and
generate RDF/XML documents for exchange.

So I'm not sure how the situation evisaged, where new tooling needs to
be developed to consumed OWL/XML and Manchester syntax, arises.

If anything, the RDF/XML expression of OWL has been strengthened as
there was significant work given to documenting the parsing of RDF/XML
into OWL. In OWL1 this was not explicit and apparently caused
developers significant pain. Additionally there is now a strong
statement about the RDF/XML serialization and its relation to OWL in
the RDF Mapping document.

let O be any OWL 2 ontology, let T(O) be the RDF graph obtained by
transforming O as specified in Section 2, and let O' be the OWL 2
ontology obtained by applying the reverse transformation from Section
3 to T(O); then, O and O' are logically equivalent — that is, they
have exactly the same set of models.

Finally I would note that there were several design decisions that
were made in order to make it easier to bridge the OWL and RDF worlds,
among them
- removal of the restriction that a name be used only for an
individual, property or class,
- the use of the more common bnode syntax, in a less restricted way
compared to previous use of Anonymous individuals,
- substantially enhanced ability to annotate anything (previously
restricted in OWL 1)
- domain, range and subproperty statements for annotation properties,
such as rdfs:label,
- the ability to owl:import RDF that was not explicitly written as OWL
(adding additional statements to make it OWL in the importing file)

The issue of keeping interoperability between OWL and RDF was on the
minds of many in the working group, and I'd like to think that the
result of that is a language specification that improves, wrt this
matter in particular, on the OWL 1 specification.

Regards,
Alan

http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/Conformance_and_Test_Cases
http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/Mapping_to_RDF_Graphs


On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 2:17 PM, Jeremy Carroll <jeremy@topquadrant.com> wrote:
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> This thread partly prompted TopQuadrant's comment on the OWL2 Last Call.
>
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/2009Jan/0053
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> in which we suggest that the
>
> The OWL2 rationale document (and the design) has not taken into account the cost of new features particularly to those who do not need them.
>
> It is unclear to me whether our perspective is atypical or is held by several consortium members, and I am interested in feedback on this point.
> (If our experience is an outlier amongst the community, then having said our piece, we should shut up!)
>
>
> Jeremy
>
>
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>
>
>
>

Received on Monday, 26 January 2009 22:48:06 UTC