- From: Smith, Michael K <michael.smith@eds.com>
- Date: Mon, 7 Jan 2002 13:36:57 -0600
- To: Jeff Heflin <heflin@cse.lehigh.edu>, WebOnt <www-webont-wg@w3.org>
I have a general requirement to propose. Perhaps it has been identified elsewhere, but I haven't seen it mentioned. OWL language literals will include any well-formed XML document. In order to be maximally successful, OWL needs to be able to deal with the 'ontologies' that are taking over the web at the moment. These are the XML standards that are being promulgated, whose semantics, such as they are, are defined in natural language or operationally, by the processes that handle them. There already exist a vast number of documents based on these shared XML schemas and DTDs. One major potential use of OWL is to make logical assertions about such objects. E.g., "this ebXML PurchaseOrder has been validated as having been sent by EDS". While an ontology might not be committed to detailing the full semantics of a PO, it could be used to reason about a specific set of sub-properties. In order for OWL to be capable of integrating with these partial ontologies, it should be the case that OWL language literals include any well-formed XML document (pick your definition of well formed, perhaps just syntactic, perhaps optionally schema-validated). Maybe this need is expected to be satisfied by the fact that most of the examples of literals already include strings as permitted data types. But it would seem more useful to make parsed documents directly available as literals. This capability might also be used to support reification. Though it provides no help at all with the more important question of what the semantics of reification might be. - Mike Michael K. Smith EDS Austin Innovation Lab 98 San Jacinto, Suite 500 Austin, TX 78701 Work: 512 404-6683 Cell: 512 789-4477 Fax : 512 404-6655 -----Original Message----- From: Jeff Heflin [mailto:heflin@cse.lehigh.edu] Sent: Monday, January 07, 2002 12:25 PM To: WebOnt Subject: Face-to-Face: General Requirements Reading Attached below is the final draft of the General Requirements document for the face-to-face meeting next week. Please read this before the meeting and determine if there are issues you would like to discuss during the meeting. In particular, the General Requirements subgroup welcomes feedback on the completeness of the requirements we have identified. Jeff Heflin
Received on Monday, 7 January 2002 14:37:07 UTC