POWDER: thoughts

Cc-ing ivan and bijan since they seem interested.

I am going to start a variety of threads on www-archive, with the intent 
that we pick the threads up on the tuesday meeting.

I take it that the theme of the discussion is trying to evaluate powder 
design options to get appropriate balance between 'correctness' with 
respect to the more mathematical bits of the SW Recs (OWL and RDF), and 
usability by the intended user base.
The ideal outcome would be one where small amounts of attention to 
detail, make little to no impact on usability, but enhance 'correctness' 
and hence interoperability with off-the-shelf SW tools.

Poor outcomes would be ones in which tension between the two objectives 
(correctness and usability) become conflict; and either POWDER users 
feel that usability is sacrificed for ill-defined and elitist logical 
goals, or the SW specs, at least their logical parts, are simply ignored 
because they are unhelpful.

I'll try and start these threads:

- reification, or what?
    I dislike reification, and will argue against it, and in favour of 
the design in the powder-dr WD, with minor mods.

- resource descriptions, as a semantic extension??
   RDF semantics makes no provision for examining the IRIs used for 
resources. This is not addressed by OWL 1.0 or OWL 1.1. This is 
fundamental to POWDER; and should, in my view, be addressed by formally 
creating a suitable semantic extension.

- resource descriptions and monotonicity
   I got a bad non-monotonic feeling while reading the powder-grouping 
WD; interestingly it was while reading bits that had clearly been 
written with the issue in mind :(

- the subclass relationship
   I take the reified rdfs:subClassOf triple in the example that has 
circulated in earlier e-mail to be a response to a request to be more 
formal, or more OWL like, in response to the powder-dr WD. However, the 
design in the WD looks more user-friendly to me, if it could be made to 
work ...

- tools and motivations

Why o why are we bothered?

Jeremy

Received on Friday, 14 December 2007 15:58:45 UTC