Re: The effect of WebOnt Working Group

On Sun, 2 Dec 2001, Charlie Abela wrote:

Hi there

> These are the feelings of one that is new to the SW idea and is trying to
> catch up with the latest, but things seem to be getting more difficult.
>
> For the past month or so I have been experimenting with RDF and DAML+OIL,
> since my undergraduate thesis is based on the use of such markup languages.
> Recently the W3C Web Ontology (WebOnt) Working Group was created with the
> intent of creating yet another offspring of these markups. The intent is to
> create a standard ontology language for the web. I ask, what effect is this
> going to have on the applications that have been developed or are being
> developed using the previously stated markups? Where are DAML+OIL, RDF going
> to end up?
>
> Comments and positive reassurances are more than welcome.

I hope I can re-assure you somewhat. There has long been careful
discussion between the DAML+OIL folk and the RDF WG about how to layer the
design so that things fit together well. Now that we have a W3C Working
Group to look at a DAML+OIL-like Ontology language for the Web, we can
have those discussions in a more structured way. The WebOnt charter [1]
says that DAML+OIL "should be considered as a starting draft for this
particular WG product". Recent tweaks to RDF Schema from the RDF Core WG
have also fixed some bugs that made interoperability with DAML+OIL tricky.

So, while the new Web Ontology language might differ from DAML+OIL, we are
taking DAML+OIL as a starting point; and RDF Schema of course. One should
be able to write RDF Schemas now, and be confident that these richer extensions
to RDF will fit nicely with the basic 'classes and properties' mechanism
provided by RDFS. It isn't clear yet how similar the Web Ontology language
will be to DAML+OIL. The WG are currently discussing use cases, to motive
their design discussions. If you have implementation feedback from your
RDF and DAML+OIL investigations that may be relevent, do please share your
findings here, where they can be passed on to the Working Group(s) for
consideration.

cheers,

Dan



[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/WebOnt/charter
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2001Nov/



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Received on Saturday, 1 December 2001 18:56:20 UTC