Introduction: Dan Brickley

Hi all

A quick note to introduce myself. I'm a member of the Semantic Web
Coordination Group, chair of the RDF/SW Interest Group and co-chair of the
RDF Core WG (though Brian McBride really does all the work). While I am
not a formal member of the Web Ontology WG, Jim and Dan have been good
enough to allow me to join the mailing list in the interests of liaison
with the other RDF and XML efforts underway at W3C. I have tried to follow
the discussions to date and will send some comments on 'WOL' use cases separately.

My main connection to WebOnt work is as editor of the RDF Schema
1.0 Specification, which is now a work item of the RDF Core WG. In the
original RDF Schema design (dating from ~1998) we tried to create a
minimalistic framework that could be elaborated on by successor
specifications. In the original RDFS WG we considered (and
postponed) work on issues such as class-specific constraints, and
datatyping. RDF Core is currently working on datatyping, and systems such
as DAML+OIL have done a lot of work on richer ways of describing RDF
classes and properties. In RDF Schema, our main design constraints was
simplicity; we tried to make it possible for languages such as WebOnt to
add in richer facilities later.

So I'm very happy to see WebOnt underway, and to see the design work
happening in the context of concrete use cases. Getting the
complexity/simplicity balance right for WebOnt is a tough challenge, and
one that needs to be grounded in real world applications. My personal
interests w.r.t. WebOnt language features are those that stem from working
on a number of RDF-based applications over the last 4 years, and from
making use of some DAML+OIL-based features to augment the rather basic
ontologies I've created with RDF Schema 1.0.

I'll send more on this separately. More by way of 'introduction' can be
found in my RDFCore WG intro[1] or via my W3C and personal home pages[2].

all the best,

Dan



[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2001Apr/0046.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/People/DanBri/
    http://rdfweb.org/people/danbri/

Received on Tuesday, 18 December 2001 12:33:52 UTC