- From: Jim Hendler <hendler@cs.umd.edu>
- Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 14:12:41 -0400
- To: "Smith, Michael K" <michael.smith@eds.com>, Jeremy Carroll <jjc@hplb.hpl.hp.com>, "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>
- Cc: jonathan@openhealth.org, www-webont-wg@w3.org
At 12:46 PM -0500 7/31/02, Smith, Michael K wrote: >Just thought I would add my 2 cents for the record. > >It has taken me a long time, but I have finally figured out that if you want >to sell something to someone, you make it easy for them to buy. > >We want to sell OWL to the world. If our readers pick up the OWL documents >and the first thing they see are multiple owl:, rdf:, and rdfs: prefixes, >they are likely to think they need to understand 3 things in order to >understand OWL. That raises the bar unneccessarily. > >Of course, tools can mitigate this, but the first thing people are going to >see are our documents. > >I'm not passionate about this. For me, a symbol is a symbol. But by the >same reasoning, substituting for equals shouldn't make our job any harder. >The issue of interpretation by RDF tools does not seem to me to be hugely >significant. I confess I am not familiar with the tool landscape, but >modifying these systems (the thinest end of the web ontology adoption wave) >seems trivial. If the implementors choose not to do so, then they won't be >able to extract useful RDF information from OWL KBs. So be it. > >- Mike > >Michael K. Smith, Ph.D., P.E. >EDS - Austin Innovation Centre >98 San Jacinto, #500 >Austin, TX 78701 > >* phone: +01-512-404-6683 >* mailto:michael.smith@eds.com >www.eds.com > Mike - The other day I went to talk at NASA HQ and met with a bunch of folks already using RDF and RDFS. They had the other perception - they thought this meant OWL would mean they had to rewrite all their existing stuff for owl tools (until I explained those "sameXXXas" statements). I don't mean for that to be an opinion -- but rather to stress that whatever we do we will end up confusing someone - our best hope is to make sure our walkthru documents emphasize and exemplify whichever the preferred approach is and explain it carefully. -- 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) Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 240-731-3822 (Cell) http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler
Received on Wednesday, 31 July 2002 14:26:26 UTC