Re: OWL and LOD

On 12/5/09 12:14, Steve Harris wrote:
> On 12 May 2009, at 10:49, John Goodwin wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I was just curious how many OWL sceptics we have in the LOD community?
>> Rightly or wrongly I get the impression there are a few?
>>
> OWL hasn't historically been very practical over large datasets, but I
> have high hopes for some of the new dialects in OWL2.

It's worth distinguishing here between runtime use of OWL reasoners over 
massive datasets, versus OWL as a documentation standard.

There is no reason at all to avoid use of OWL in documenting your 
classes and properties if OWL usefully captures the meaning of the terms.

Asking eg. whether a property is considered a functional property, or 
whether two classes are disjoint, is a useful discipline for all RDF 
application developers. OWL provides the modelling and terminological 
tools for doing this. Developers shouldn't be discouraged from doing so 
by concerns that larger data systems subsequently won't scale. Making 
use of the OWL information is a largely separate problem...

(Of course if you go crazy creating massive and intricately linked class 
hierarchies that can only be usefully deployed in the presence of a 
reasoner, that's another story...).

cheers,

Dan

Received on Tuesday, 12 May 2009 11:12:31 UTC