comments on Issue 5.17 - XML and UML presentation syntax

From the minutes of the Nov. 14th telecon
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2002Nov/0201.html
>
> = Issue 5.17 - XML and UML presentation syntax
> Some feeling from WG that these should not be Notes, that they should
> be non-normative appendices or otherwise included in our docs = Jon B
> points out it is very useful to tell people there are XML and UML
> version of our language in our docs.  Peter (?) suggests maybe these
> can go in a single document.
>
> chairs and team contact will think about how to proceed.

I do agree with the usefulness of the XML and UML representations of OWL.
Those syntaxes are actually helpful for practitioners in industry to start
working with OWL.  In experiences, most software engineers and developers
(not researchers) are quite familiar with UML and XML.  I am not saying
every
practitioner will use OWL, but alternative syntaxes will substantially
facilitate for such people to start learning OWL whenever they need to do
so.
I am afraid that the 'Notes' status would not be convincing enough for them
to start working with the XML/UML presentations of OWL.

Since this WG already has a very nice OWL Guide, it would be useful to
provide
a collection of XML fragments and UML diagrams for every example that
appears
in the OWL Guide (and maybe some from the OWL Test Cases?), in addition to
the
overall notation guide for the XML and UML presentations.  I am not so sure
if they should be given as appendix of the OWL Guide or not.  But if we
provide
the XML and UML stuff in a separate document, it would be a clear message
of
this WG to the broader audience.


*** One specific comment on the XML Schema for OWL:
***
The XML schema currently defined for OWL Full, but I think it would be
better
to provide XML schemata for OWL Lite & DL as well.  Since the OWL Lite, DL,
and
Full are not so different with each other, it would make sense to adopt a
modularization approach in the Schema definition as being pursued in XHTML
in
XML Schema [http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-m12n-schema/].



-Masahiro


Masahiro Hori, Ph.D.
Group Leader, Programming Models & Tools,
IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory
Tel: +81-46-215-4667 / Fax: +81-46-274-4282
Email: horim@jp.ibm.com

Received on Friday, 15 November 2002 07:59:42 UTC