Re: Feature Synopsis Review

[snip]

Jeremy:
>
>
>Overall I agree with Peter that this document should be merged into the
>reference. The exclusion of syntactic considerations from the scope of this
>document is a critical omission for a recommendation that if it is to serve
>any purpose acts to define the OWL Lite/OWL DL/OWL Full levels.
>

I would strongly oppose this.  Getting Feature correct and up to date 
is important, copying some of the text from Feature into Ref (when 
the former is better) is fine, but I have found the Feature document 
to be amazingly useful both in running my research group (where we 
often need to check real quick as to which feature is used for what 
as people come up the learning curve - i.e. knowing they want to make 
a local restriction, they look in feature, discover what to use, and 
then look in ref or guide for syntax or examples) and in promoting 
our langauge - especially in non-English speaking countries.  During 
recent trips to Japan, for example, I pointed a number of people at 
Feature so they could see what our langauge was about, without them 
having to expend a lot of time and energy understanding it.  Several 
are now using it regularly (including people at several large 
companies who have now decided to use OWL instead of XML Schema for 
their representation of vocabularies) and I believe that if they'd 
had to start with Guide or Ref, they might not have made the effort - 
Features motivated them to look at the other documents.
  I see no reason to reconsider the decision by the WG to have such a 
document, it is useful and augments the other documents.  We go to 
recommendation with a full set of docs, and Features will point 
people to Ref, whcih has the syntactic details and to the semantic 
documents, so our recommendation will indeed have the details Jeremy 
points out we need.
  Again, we do need to catch features up with the three levels and the 
various issues we closed, but not to remove it.
  -JH


-- 
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)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-731-3822 (Cell)
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler

Received on Tuesday, 31 December 2002 12:40:42 UTC