LANG: What does "simpler" mean?

There was some discussion at an earlier teleconf on what the deciding factor 
was to put something in the "Lite" part of the proposed language.

I argued that the "Lite" part was "simpler", without being very clear on what 
"simpler" meant.

A telephone conversation with Deb McGuinness prompted me to be more explicit 
about this design goal of the "Lite" layer. (I'm not speaking for Peter or Ian 
here...)

Frank.
    ----

The OWL Light subset was intended to be simpler than Full OWL in some
way. There was some discussion at the teleconf what "simpler" meant.
It means "conceptually simpler",
not "syntactically simpler",
not "computationally simpler".

- CONCEPTUALLY SIMPLER. The goal was to make a subset of Full OWL
that was conceptually easy to understand by our target group, and that
made it easy to say things that users want to say often.
This is also the reason why OWL Light contains "shorthand notations"
for things that could already be said in longhand. The shorthands are
meant to make it easy to say and understand the things that people
want to say often.

- SYNTACTICALLY SIMPLER: This was >*not*< the simplicity we were
striving for. In fact, I think it is unlikely that the OWL Light will
have a much simpler grammar than Full OWL. I think it will be
somewhat simpler through the lack of nested expressions (the
<description>'s in [1]), but not much.

- COMPUTATIONALLY SIMPLER: Again, this was >*not*< the simplicity we were
striving for. Although OWL Light is in fact less expressive than Full
OWL, this was not our main driving force.


[1] http://www.cs.vu.nl/~frankh/spool/OWL-first-proposal/

Received on Tuesday, 2 April 2002 17:37:15 UTC