- From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- Date: 13 Feb 2002 13:41:52 -0600
- To: www-webont-wg@w3.org
Our requirements document is going to be the first exposure that some folks get to our work; I can imagine it showing up in Robin Cover's XML new stuff; he'll probably grab the abstract: "This document specifies goals, requirements, and usage scenarios for the OWL web ontology language." I can imagine xml-dev/www-talk folks saying, "er.. gee, thanks; now what's an ontology language?" That's elaborated later in the document; let's see if there's some text to grab... yes: Put simply, an ontology is just a set of standard vocabularly terms along with some formal definitions of the terms. Lightly edited: An ontology is vocabularly of terms along with some formal definitions of the terms. I'd like another sentence that gives a short list of examples: the yahoo hierarchy kindom/phylum/class sorts of biological taxonomies product categorization: menswear vs. sporting goods vs. perishables Or maybe a few buzzwords from our use cases would be better: Portals, image collections, site management, Intelligent Agents. Oh... please flesh out the TOC. Please make sure all the buzzwords are in there! Hmm... about the intro in general... The W3C has chartered a Web Ontology working group (WebOnt) to develop a language which extends the semantic reach of current XML and RDF meta-data efforts. I prefer to think that the chartering isn't the cause of our work; it's one of the effects. Presumably W3C chartered this work because folks think it's useful. What is it that folks think is useful? The three examples I gave above are the sorts of things I expect that our audience will be familiar with which motivate our work. I'd suggest starting there. The term ontology may be unfamiliar to many readers of this document. That seems superfluous. I suggest striking it. This notion of ontologies comes from Artificial Intelligence, where ontologies are used to allow heterogeneous systems to exchange and reason with information. I'd suggest either citing specific work in this area or striking the reference to Artificial Intelligence. One of the problems with using ordinary XML is that the elements and attributes defined by DTDs or XML Schemas do not have any semantics associated with them; I think a lot of folks in our audience see the lack of semantics in XML as a feature, not a problem. Even myself: I don't see a lack of semantics in XML as a problem with XML, any more than the lack of semantics in s-expressions or binary trees is a problem. I'm not sure what to suggest as a replacement, other than going right into use cases: "Consider the problem of exchanging parts catalogs between suppliers...". Maybe copying some stuff from the Web Portal use case into the introductory material would be straightforward? http://km.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/owl/ Web Ontology Requirements W3C Working Draft Feb 7, 2002 1:30 pm -- Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
Received on Wednesday, 13 February 2002 14:41:29 UTC