OWL DB, OWL UML, etc.

Lately as I've been using and teaching OWL much more, I think I have 
come to a better understanding of OWL vs. OWL DL and the real power 
of having a reasoner-specific profile of OWL (i.e. OWL DL).  I've 
also begun scratching around on some papers and talking to some 
colleagues, and it becomes clear that there are other subsets of OWL 
Full that might also be tremendously useful for other kinds of tools. 
For example, it became clear that a fair subset of the OWL 
expressiveness can be accounted for in the  calculus used by 
relational database systems -- interestingly, although this is a much 
less expressive language than OWL, some things which are outside of 
OWL DL (particularly inverseFunctionalProperties on datatype 
properties) are easily covered with that calculus.   Similarly, Guus 
had shown at one point (and it needs to be revisited) that UML has a 
different set of restrictions than would naturally be OWL DL.
  So, this is mostly musing, but the question it brings up is whether 
there is a common core of OWL that would like be in all of these 
subsets, or whether it makes sense to think of OWL as what is now 
referred to as OWL Full, and to think of all these subsets as 
specialized profiles for particular kinds of applications (and the 
commonality would provide at least some kinds of interoperability - 
esp. with respect to editing, visualization, etc.)
  Anyone working on any of the OWL-xxx subsets they'd care to discuss? 
I admit to starting work on OWL DB,  which strikes me as an important 
one if database integration is really going to be a major application 
of OWL, and wonder if this is something that others are playing with.
  In short, I think it was Bijan who once commented that once OWL was 
out there might be a cottage industry in creating special subsets for 
particular application classes - seems like that might not be a bad 
idea...
  -JH

-- 
Professor James Hendler			  http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-277-3388 (Cell)

Received on Tuesday, 11 May 2004 15:00:15 UTC