- From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- Date: 28 Mar 2002 16:41:24 -0600
- To: Jeff Heflin <heflin@cse.lehigh.edu>
- Cc: WebOnt <www-webont-wg@w3.org>
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