Re: Using OWL to define itself?

From: Jim Hendler <hendler@cs.umd.edu>
Subject: Re: Using OWL to define itself?
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 20:36:15 -0500

> At 9:30 -0500 3/10/03, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
> >From: "Roger L. Costello" <costello@mitre.org>
> >Subject: Using OWL to define itself?
> >Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 07:59:46 -0500
> >
> >>
> >>  Hi Folks,
> >>
> >>  In the OWL Reference, Appendix B is a definition of OWL using RDF
> >>  Schemas (actually, it also uses OWL features, so it is not strictly
> >>  using RDF Schemas).  I believe that this document should be considered a
> >>  definition of OWL Full, correct?
> >
> >No, this ontology cannot be considered to be a definition of any species of
> >OWL.  It is at best a document that one might look at to get some idea of
> >what can be said in the OWL syntax.
> >
> >>  Is there a similar document for OWL DL, and for OWL Lite?  That would be
> >>  very useful, especially for identifying the differences between Full,
> >>  DL, and Lite.  /Roger
> >
> >Many of the differences between OWL Full and OWL DL would not show up in
> >this sort of document.  It might be helpful to illustrate some of the
> >differences between OWL DL and OWL Lite in this way, but I'm not sure how
> >much could be so captured.
> >
> >peter
> 
> 
> This document is also the namespace document for OWL -- that is, it 
> defines the legal vocabulary of OWL and the relationships between the 
> concepts.  Note that all three OWL sublangauges use (subsets of) the 
> same vocabulary, and thus we can use the same namespace for all of 
> them
>   -JH

Umm, I don't see how this can work this way.  The document that defines the
legal vocabulary of OWL and the relationships between the concepts is the
OWL semantics document not owl.owl, unless I am seriously confused as to
how OWL is specified.  Similarly, I don't think that the equivalent
documents for RDF or RDFS define the vocabulary for these formalisms.

In fact, these three documents are the wrong sort of documents to define a
vocabulary, which is generally done by a DTD or XML Schema.

Peter F. Patel-Schneider
Bell Labs Research
Lucent Technologies

Received on Tuesday, 11 March 2003 05:55:49 UTC