Re: proposal for working on the ontology language

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