Re: UPDATE: longer version of layering document

>. It is up to the working group chairs
>  > to decide whether such an innitiative looks worth while to try.

All, I want to start by congratulating Peter, Dieter and everyone who 
helped them in creating a masterful document for explaining the 
problems.  Now we come to the hard part, we as a group need to figure 
out what to do about it!

Dan has already responded with some of this, but let me see if I can 
outline the solution space as I understand it.

1) We have some recommendations we are making to RDF Core. However, I 
do not believe we as a working group can mandate this, and thus we 
need to make our own decision as to what to do to OWL (if anything) 
to deal with this issue.

2) The decision space includes a variety of approaches that haven't 
even been discussed -- remember that this is an issue of our own 
making.  We have the right to do things as drastic as to decide not 
to have a model theory (and simply use some sort of rules as our 
semantics) all the way to deciding we can live with the ambiguities 
and move on or putting some specific langauge features in to deal 
with this issue.  [note: I do not mean to advocate any of these 
solutions - just trying to make it clear we have a lot of leeway]

3) HOWEVER, there is a constraint on us by our charter.  It reads 
(emphasizing some key points):

>The Working Group shall start by evaluating the technical solutions 
>proposed in the DAML+OIL draft. If in this process the Working Group 
>finds SOLUTIONS that are AGREED to be IMPROVEMENTS over solutions 
>suggested by DAML+OIL, those improved solutions should be used.


That is a strong statement --  it implies if we do not reach 
AGREEMENT that something is an improvement over D+O we should use the 
D+O solution.  So for us to depart from D+O we need an agreed upon 
technical solution that is satisfactory to the whole group (i.e. a 
consensus)

4) The excellent document you should all have read by now hints at 
some possible ways to solve the problem that we MIGHT agree to - but 
we need to move forward on reaching a consensus - please note that 
the "default"  is to do it like D+O (and just ignore the problem) 
which did not seem to be the consensus of the group at the f2f - but 
no consensus on another approach has yet emerged.

  THUS, Guus and I need the members of the group to suggest a MEANS by 
which we can start to move to conclusion on this issue.  Please note, 
while I am very happy to see continued discussion of technical issues 
relating to this - and such are necessary - the goal is to find a 
MEANS to resolve this.

Please note also, when I say a means to resolve this - I mean that we 
must reach a specific language solution that we can all live with, 
and that meets our requirements.

  -Jim Hendler




-- 
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 Sunday, 10 February 2002 17:35:09 UTC