Re: LANG: Is a non-RDF triples syntax out of charter?

On Thu, 2002-03-28 at 15:46, Jeff Heflin wrote:
> In the telecon today, when I mentioned that I was in favor of an
> ontology language that was not constructed using RDF triples, Dan
> Connolly suggested that this was outside of the charter. I have since
> gone back and reread the charter, in order to determine if my suggestion
> is clearly out of it. I was only able to find two relevant sentences to
> this issue, which I discuss below.
> 
> The charter says the group must design "a Web ontology language, that
> builds on current Web languages that allow the specification of classes
> and subclasses, properties and subproperties (such as RDFS)." This is
> probably what Dan is referring to. I may be getting into semantics here,
> but I understand this as "RDFS may be one such language that we should
> build on," not that we have to build on RDF. That is it says, "such as
> RDF," not "including RDF." So, I don't find this a convincing reason for
> rejecting my point of view.

There's a whole community of folks expecting WebOnt's work
product to work with RDF the way DAML+OIL works with RDF:
i.e. it just adds more well-known terms for use in RDF.

Perhaps I overstated the point when I referred to the charter...
but if we decide that WebOnt's product doesn't
work with RDF the way DAML+OIL does, then we're going
to have to renegotiate with that community somehow.
I think a change to the charter would be in order,
but perhaps I could be persuaded that some other
mechanism of renegotiation would suffice.


> The charter also say the language "will be designed for maximum
> compatibility with XML and RDF language conventions." The phrase
> "maximum compatibility" appears to give us some wiggle room. If we feel
> that a certain degree of compatibility is impossible without undermining
> the goals of our language, then maximum compatibility might be slightly
> below that point. Also note that RDF Schema is not mentioned in that
> sentence, and my proposal is that we still use RDF for representing
> data, we just shouldn't use triples to represent logical definitions.
> 
> Thus, I would say that it is not clear that we are chartered to extend
> RDF Schema. Furthermore, there is certainly nothing in the charter that
> says the ontology language's syntax must be formed from RDF triples.
> 
> Jeff
-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Thursday, 28 March 2002 17:41:19 UTC