- From: Jim Hendler <hendler@cs.umd.edu>
- Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 20:01:46 -0500
- To: Leo Obrst <lobrst@mitre.org>
- Cc: Tim Finin <finin@cs.umbc.edu>, "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>, www-webont-wg@w3.org
Accroding to W3C policy, one of my main roles as chair is to rule on what is in and out of charter. As with all such, I open these to discussion, but will eventually need to rule if consensus isn't reached. Rules was easy because it was explicite in the charter - here are my initial reactions to Leo's questions, but please let me know if you think differently. At 6:14 PM -0500 12/11/01, Leo Obrst wrote: >If rules are outside our charter, what about statements of equivalences >between 2 ontologies (e.g., for semantic mappings for the content >interoperability use case)? I believe DAML+OIL just has >daml:sameClassAs (class expressions) >daml:equivalentTo (class or property expressions) [and when applied to >properties, is the same as samePropertyAs] >daml:samePropertyAs (property expressions) > >Is this sufficient? I think these are ontology-internal constructs, no? >Might they be used across ontologies? Our charter reads "In addition, the language must support the development and linking of ontologies together, in a web-like manner." Therefore I see this as clearly within charter. I do see that ultimately there may be some grey area between linking ontologies and rules, but for now I think we can differentiate these clearly enough to stay out of trouble. > >I also note that there is no meta level to DAML+OIL and I think that was >a conscious choice, no?, though I don't know the history of that >decision. Sometimes having a modifiable meta level is a very good thing >(future language extensions, e.g.) I don't see why this would be out of scope, although it seems fairly ambitious given where we are and where we are trying to get to. I'd say that if there is a clear need for this expressed in the use cases, and a clear consensus in the group that this should be pursued, it is doable. If it starts to really depart from current D+O, we might need to go back to the coordination group and get a definitive decision. by the way, as I understand the W3C process, we can have material outside our recommendation that helps pave the way for the future. For example, if we wanted to (I'm not suggesting this, just using it as an example) we could decide that some parts of the current D+O were too hard to understand/use/implement, but still seemed worth pointing out. We could create a working document which would not be part of the candidate req, but would be a suggestion for future recommendation or the like. I think it is too early to worry about this, just wanted to point it out as an option for things that seem too "researchy" to some members, but too applied for others. -- Prof. James Hendler Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technology 301-405-2696 (phone) Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab 301-405-8488 (fax) University of Maryland http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler College Park, MD 20742
Received on Tuesday, 11 December 2001 20:09:13 UTC