- From: Peter F. Patel-Schneider <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>
- Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2002 10:05:38 -0400
- To: www-webont-wg@w3.org
As I was reading Guus's agenda for the face-to-face, it occured to me that there is very little information there about planning for the future. There is a session partly reserved for this, but no background or plan is given for this session. I feel that without some background and a plan, this session will not be productive. My proposal is that this session should be mostly devoted to planning with respect to finishing the definition of OWL. The documents currently being developed in the working group do not form a complete definition of OWL and the missing sections need to be filled in very soon. I am thus providing a proposal for filling in these missing sections. As I see it, there are the following documents underway in the working group: Current OWL Documents Name Description Author(s)/Editor(s) 1 Requirements document Heflin Listing of requirements for OWL 2 Issues document Michael Smith Listing of issues for the WG 3 OWL Feature synopsis McGuinness et al High-level, informal description of OWL features 4 OWL Reference Description Dean Informal description of OWL KBs in triple form 5 OWL Formal specification Patel-Schneider et al. Formal specification of abstract syntax of OWL Informal description of meaning of abstract syntax 6 OWL XML Presentation Syntax Patel-Schneider 7 OWL UML Presentation Syntax Schreiber These leave three portions of OWL unspecified: M1 What is an OWL KB in triple form, and, more importantly, what collections of triples are not OWL KBs? M2 What is the translation from the abstract syntax to triples? M3 What is the formal meaning of an OWL KB? Jeremy Carroll has made a proposal that includes the idea that not all collections of triples are OWL KBs. I strongly support this idea and, moreover, *propose* that the definition of just what constitutes an OWL KB in triple form be specified as the result of a mapping from the abstract syntax, something like the mapping in http://www-db.research.bell-labs.com/user/pfps/owl/translation.html This document provides both a mapping from the abstract syntax to triples, filling in M2, and (at the very end) a definition of what collections of triples constitute an OWL KB, filling in M1. As far as M2 (the formal meaning of an OWL KB) goes, I have previously sent out a semantics for OWL KBs in abstract syntax form. This document is available at http://www-db.research.bell-labs.com/user/pfps/owl/semantics.html I *propose* that the meaning of OWL KBs be specified from the abstract syntax. OWL KBs in other forms would be given meaning by translation back to the abstract syntax. These two additions would, I think, complete the set of documents needed for a definition of OWL. Of course, much work needs to be done to update, revise, and harmonize these documents, but I feel that the planning session of the upcoming face-to-face would be a good time to at least start discussion on how to proceed on filling in the holes in the definition of OWL. Peter F. Patel-Schneider PS: Note that I have not said anything about layering issues. One way of handling layering would be to make some of the triples in an OWL ontology RDF-dark.
Received on Wednesday, 19 June 2002 10:05:48 UTC