Re: issue 5.10: a position statement (sameState over peopleKey)

On Thu, 2002-07-04 at 09:07, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
> 
> I feel that there are really two different positions on issue 5.10
> (DAML+OIL semantics are too weak).
> 
> The first position is that what matters most is getting the entailments
> correct for OWL.  This position would support entailments like 
> 	John belongs to the intersection of Student and Employee
> 	entails
> 	John belongs to the intersection of Employee and Student
> and many other natural entailments.
> 
> The second position is that what matters most is making OWL have the exact
> same syntax as RDF and have its semantics be an extension of the RDF
> semantics.  This position would support entailments only if they can be
> done without disturbing this compatability.
> 
> I find the first position by far the most compelling.  I cannot understand
> why OWL should be potentially crippled by forcing it into a overly-strict
> compatability with RDF.

OWL is uninteresting, to me, on its own.

OWL is only interesting inasmuch as, when making new RDF vocabularies
(or refining descriptions of old ones),
widespread deployment of OWL allows me to use owl terms to constrain
the meanings of the terms in my RDF vocabulary in such a way that
lots of other folks will understand those constraints.

If I can't use OWL along with the mozilla open directory,
Adobe's XMP tools, RSS 1.0, CC/PP, PRISM, MusicBrainz,
etc. (see http://www.w3.org/RDF/#projects), then I don't
understand why I'm working on it. By "along with" I mean:
in the same documents, with the same domain of discourse,
with all the entailments justified by the RDF Core specs.

Meanwhile, I wonder if this sort of rhetorical debate is likely
to get us anywhere.

I would prefer to debate the specifics of the sameState
vs. peopleKey test cases (along with any other specific
test cases and tools that are available). As far as I can tell,
we can't expect software to get both of them right
any time soon.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2002Jul/0132.html

On the basis of my experience as a user and an implementor,
I prefer that our spec justifies the sameState entailment, and
it's acceptable to me if it doesn't justify the peopleKey entailment.
This does not support the "detecting inconsistency" goal, but as
far as I can tell, it doesn't contradict any of our agreed requirements.

As an example of this experience, please see:

  Semantic Web Travel Tools
  http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/pim/travel.html



-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Thursday, 18 July 2002 14:39:50 UTC