- From: Jim Hendler <hendler@cs.umd.edu>
- Date: Fri, 1 Mar 2002 10:22:35 -0500
- To: "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>, www-webont-wg@w3.org
- Cc: connolly@w3.org
At 8:00 AM -0500 3/1/02, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote: > Constructing Web Ontology Languages > or > Why Jumping on Four Horses is a Good Recipe for Quartering Peter- I think I agree with everything you said in your message, except the overall implication that somehow layering drives the whole process. It is a necessary player, but it seems to me the language functionality, driven by the work we've been doing in use cases and reqs could also be put up as the main driver. here's my argument 1) Let's assume the group decided that RDFS was the perfect ontology language and needed no new language features. In this case, layering with RDFS is perfect and the problem goes away 2) Let's assume the group decided the entire DAML+OIL functionality, plus more is what we want. In this case, the layering issue, and how we deal with it, becomes important. So somewhere in the middle between no new features and lots of new features will be language designs that are perfectly compatible (i.e. no paradoxes), that are not as compatible (i.e. paradoxes abound) and that are "fixably compatible" (i.e. w/some trade-offs we could manage to get a language people like with no major paradoxical situation) seems to me, therefore, that until some strawman language proposals come along, and Frank has agreed to start this process, there is no way we can discuss the specifics of layering -- we can discuss the philosophy of how we see languages fitting together (and your document was a great start on that discussion), and we can discuss practical implications with respect to syntax once we have some proposed language features to "test" them against. Note, this still argues for exactly the sort of coevolution and control that Peter argues for quite eloquently in his message - but I simply want to start at step 2 since I feel like we've spent four months thinking about At 8:00 AM -0500 3/1/02, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote: > >1/ Some of the basic notions of OWL are determined, such as the general way > its syntax is going to look and how it layers on top of RDF(S). but trying to do this not anchored from language features seems odd to me at this point in the process - making an a priori decision w/respect to the layering without now taking a stab at defining what we'd LIKE to accomplish is just as wrong as would be taking that stab without having been informed by the document on layering would have been. In short, I see a chicken and an egg here, and the only way I've ever seen chicken and egg problems cracked is to role up ones sleeves, get some stuff on the table from multiple perspectives, and then work to reconcile the views - and that's what I'm thinking we need to do here. In fact, that's how the Joint Committee that created DAML+OIL was formed and worked, and it seems to have worked out pretty well in the end... -- 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) AV Williams Building, Univ of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler
Received on Friday, 1 March 2002 10:22:40 UTC