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

From: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>
Subject: Re: UPDATE: document on layering OWL on top of RDF
Date: Fri, 01 Feb 2002 15:06:42 -0500

> 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 [] OWL information (as uninterpretted data). 

I'm not sure if this is a benefit.  I think of it as more of an opportunity
for chaos.  Of course, opinions may vary.

> > 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.)

Again, I'm not sure how much of a benefit the parenthetical portion is.
Any significant change to RDF, e.g., datatyping changes, is likely to
affect OWL. 

> 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.) 

I view this as more confusing than the shorter version above.

> 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.

This I agree with, and have added to my version of the document.

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

peter

Received on Friday, 1 February 2002 15:37:56 UTC