Re: REQDOC: Change List from Editors

From: Jeff Heflin <heflin@cse.lehigh.edu>
Subject: Re: REQDOC: Change List from Editors
Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2002 10:58:32 -0500

[...]

> > 6/ Some of the concerns in my previous message appear to not have made it
> >    into the list of changes.
> 
> Please let me know which concerns these were. One of the points of the
> change list is so that you can double-check that we haven't missed
> something.

Here is a version of the non-wording changes part of my first message, with
my concerns numbered and matched up with the changes in the message that was
sent out by Jonathan Dale.  

peter



[First message]

I have a bunch of comments on the Web Ontology Requirements document (Feb 7).

There are a lot of places where the working needs to be changed.  I
have carefully gone over the first section and have noted the worst
problems in other sections, but there are lots more places where the
wording is not correct.

1/ Accepted #3.

The document suffers from a serious case of self-importance.  In
particular, 

	The Web Ontology language will be a significant advance in Web
	functionality and take interoperability beyond the present stage.

pegged my hype-meter.  I think that we should be very careful to not make
such statements, particularly in a requirements document.

2/ 
The document still reads as if it was the separate creation of
different people.  The style should be at least a bit more uniform between
the various use cases subsections.

3/ 

The order of the design goals is rather strange.  In particular, I
would think that it would be better to move 3.4 before 3.3

4/ Undecided #2

The document uses words with technical meaning in places where the
technical meaning may not be what is wanted.  In particular,  unless
``resource'' means what it means in RDF I think that it should be avoided.
So
	Ontologies must be resources with their own unique identifiers.
can easily be read as implying that ontologies must be objects just like
regular objects.  

5/ Undecided #1

The document anticipates some technical features of OWL.  In particular, it
uses URI as the term identification mechanism.  This brings up the URI vs
QName discussion.  

6/ Undecided #5

There are a number of places where the document places very strong
requirements on OWL.  In particular it states
	The language *must* allow properties to be associated with
	statements.
I don't see this requirement on our ``A'' list.  

7/ Rejected #1.

There are other very strong requirements in the document, including the
closed-world requirement.  This placing of requirements on OWL continues
even into the Objectives section, where it says
	At a minimum, the language should recommend to users how they can
	specify their own default mechanisms.

8/

The beginning of Section 5 goes even further, and calls the requirements in
Section 4 ``minimal [...] features''.  This seems to be setting the WG up
to fail big-time if even one of the requirements in Section 4 is not
totally solved by OWL. 

9/ 

The lexical representations requirement seems to be arguing that URIs have
to have multiple lexical forms.  I don't think that this is what was wanted
here.

10/

Many of the requirements and objectives are not very well specified.  In
particular, what does it mean to
	support the use of variables in ontology definitions. 

11/ Accepted 4.

Some of the objectives go beyond a web ontology language.  For example,
I view speech acts and conditions outside of a web ontology language if
there is any semantics attached to their constructs.

Received on Wednesday, 20 February 2002 11:05:39 UTC