Re: WebOnt Plans (Call for feedback)

From: Jim Hendler <james.hendler@verizon.net>
Subject: WebOnt Plans (Call for feedback)
nDate: Wed, 21 Nov 2001 16:50:56 -0500

[...]

> ** Dec 13 will be aimed at looking at some of the other aspects of 
> the document and language - please send me suggestions of topics you 
> feel would be important.

There are two topics that I think we should discuss:

1/ Which documents will the working group be producing.  I know that at
this stage we don't know the complete answer to this, but it would be nice
to know if we are going to produce an (official) document concerning the
use cases that we are generating and if we are going to be producing an
(official) requirements document.

2/ What are the high-level requirements for the final ontology language.
Again we cannot come up with a final answer now, and probably won't be able
to until we are done, but I think that having some high-level requirements
now would make our work much easier. 

The kind of requirements I am think of would be something like:

a) There will be an XML surface syntax for the language.
b) All RDF/XML documents will be accepted by our language.
c) The surface syntax parsing will be compatible with XML parsing and
   validation.  It will be possible to use XML infosets or XML data models
   with post-schema validation information incorporated that have been
   generated by unmodified XML and XML-related parsers and validators as
   inputs to our post-syntactic processing.
c) There will be model theory for the language.
d) The model theory will be compatible with the RDF model theory, to the
   greatest extent possible.
e) If there is a conflict between RDF/XML syntax compatibility and RDF
   model theory compatibility, then compatibility with RDF model theory
   will have precedence.
f) The language will have decidable entailment.

[Note that I just made most of these up off the top of my head.  Some of
them do not have my support.]

I would like to have serious thought and discussion on both of these topics
from the working group before the face-to-face, so that there can be useful
discussion on them at the face-to-face.  This seems to indicate that
December 13 may be too late to first bring them up at a teleconference.

Peter F. Patel-Schneider
Bell Labs Research

Received on Wednesday, 28 November 2001 09:20:32 UTC