Re: UPDATE: document on layering OWL on top of RDF

Thanks for helping this discussion move in a productive direction.  I
don't understand all the issues as well as I should, but I do think
you omitted the benefit on option 3 (perhaps it was too obvious) and
misstated some drawbacks.

Benefits:

1/ RDF tools, including parsers, database managers, and editors, can
   handle with OWL information (as uninterpretted data). 

> Drawbacks 
> 1/ New parsers would have to be built for OWL.
> 2/ An RDFS reasoner could not be considered as an incomplete OWL reasoner.
> 4/ Syntactically valid OWL would have a different meaning in RDFS.

How about:

1/ New parsers would have to be built for OWL (but, unlike with
   options 2 and 4, they would be layered on RDF parsers, isolating
   them from RDF syntax issues and evolution.)

4/ The syntaxes for OWL and RDFS would be disjoint (with no common
   sublanguage, unless some useful overlap is found), so there could
   be no reuse of ontology information.  (which is kind of drawback 2,
   again.) 

Discussion:

In option 1, we tried to describe the ontological relationships using
RDF and found ourselves with a paradox.  With this option, instead of
just moving beyond RDF, we address the problem with a layer of
indirection: we use RDF to describe the syntactic relationships in an
ontology language.  It's not clear yet how much use RDF tools will be
with this kind of information.

     -- sandro        http://www.w3.org/People/Sandro/

Received on Friday, 1 February 2002 15:07:28 UTC