Re: DAMl "Thing" should be Top, Universal class - including concrete types

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ian Horrocks" <horrocks@cs.man.ac.uk>
To: "Tim Berners-Lee" <timbl@w3.org>
Cc: "RDF Logic list" <www-rdf-logic@w3.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2001 1:26 PM
Subject: Re: DAMl "Thing" should be Top, Universal class - including
concrete types


> Tim,
>
> I agree with a lot of what you say - it would clearly be "nicer" not
> to separate abstract and concrete domains. As I understand it, the
> idea behind daml+oil is that it provides clear semantics and potential
> implementation paths (e.g., for reasoning services) for some
> restricted subset of what can be written in RDF(S). If you want the
> semantics and the services, the cost is the restriction.

Why?

> The proposal
> simply suggests a way to extend daml+oil with (a restricted form of)
> concrete domains while still retaining the above properties.

However, it loses the ability to be a general unconstraining
langauge for unifying a very wide range of systems present and future.
This is the requirement of the semantic web

It is not a requirement to give an "implemention path" for a specific
reasoning system.  We are not designing a reasoner. We are making
a universal language which will allow the expression of information
from many difefrent systems. When a given system has limited descriptive
power, then its input and output will be limited to a subset of the
language.

Tim

Received on Thursday, 1 February 2001 09:57:33 UTC