Re: WOWG: first language proposal

>
>
>I asked some time ago what are the great advantages of RDFS that
>justify us paying such a high price - I am still waiting for a
>convincing answer (and considering the price, the answer needs to be
>pretty convincing).
>
>Ian


Ian - without going so far as a scope ruling, I feel obligated to 
point out that you have this exactly backwards.  Our charter says we 
will use the DAML+OIL solution (a/k/a RDFS) unless we can come up 
with a convincing answer as to why we cannot!  In short, the price of 
going to non-RDF solutions is that it will lose us support within the 
semantic web activity, will cause us to have to do a huge amount of 
work to change our chartering and activity description, and will 
require an absolute consensus from the WG that this is a BETTER 
solution (again, I quote our charter which everyone in this WG signed 
on to).

So the question I ask is for someone to show me compelling and 
convincing reasons that we should not use RDF/RDFS.
  -JH
<:personal-Opinion>
p.s. Taking my chair hat off for a minute, I must admit that I agree 
with Dan Connolly, if the WG decides to move away from RDF(S) that is 
its choice, but I'll have a lot of trouble putting as much of my time 
and effort into a solution that, frankly, I think the XML world will 
ignore and the RDF world will reject, leaving us with no constituency 
at all -- and the ironic thing is DAML+OIL will end up being the 
competitor we lose to...
</:personalOpinion>
-- 
Professor James Hendler				  hendler@cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
AV Williams Building, Univ of Maryland		  College Park, MD 20742
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler

Received on Saturday, 6 April 2002 08:22:15 UTC