- From: David Booth <david@dbooth.org>
- Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2020 18:32:26 -0400
- To: Patrick J Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
- Cc: semantic-web@w3.org
On 6/30/20 3:12 PM, Patrick J Hayes wrote: >> On Jun 30, 2020, at 9:40 AM, David Booth wrote: >> I REALLY wish that some PhD students would take on this >> challenge: to design a higher-level successor to RDF, >> with a top-line goal of making it easy enough for AVERAGE >> developers (middle 33% of skill), who are new to it, to be >> consistently success. > > Might that be (a subset of?) OWL2 using the Manchester syntax? I doubt it, even though the Manchester syntax does make OWL much more understandable than OWL-in-Turtle. Two reasons: - I think OWL itself is too hard for average developers (mid 33%). Although the various OWL constructs in isolation -- expressed in Manchester syntax, at least -- are understandable enough, average developers (the onese I've seen) don't exhibit the precise careful reasoning of a logician. And they don't approach applications as a logician would, by starting with a few iron-clad axioms and rules that they've thought long and hard about, adding data, and then turning a big reasoner crank to get the desired results. They approach applications more operationally, through a series of small steps that they can successively implement and test, to eventually produce the desired result at the end. - The majority of RDF (or graph database) applications that I see are much more like big data integration problems than semantic inference problems, and they typically do not need OWL. There certainly are some projects that make important beneficial use of OWL -- based on the OBO Foundry ontologies, for example -- but from what I've seen, they're not generally done by *average* developers. There's usually a PhD or two involved. Anyway, that's what I've seen. Others might have different views. David Booth
Received on Tuesday, 30 June 2020 22:32:39 UTC