- From: John F. Sowa <sowa@bestweb.net>
- Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2002 09:14:40 -0400
- To: Alexander Maedche <Maedche@fzi.de>
- Cc: www-rdf-logic@w3.org, www-rdf-interest@w3.org, www-webont-wg@w3.org, seweb-list@cs.vu.nl, kaw@swi.psy.uva.nl
Alex, Thanks for the information. I agree that having a flexible modular system with clearly defined import and export options is essential. Your note, quoted below, is a good response, and I suggest that you include it (or something like it) in an FAQ list on your web site. John Sowa __________________________________________________________ Dear all, actually we analyzed what can be reused from existing open source software components like - XML Parsers - RDF Parsers - Relational Databases - Application Servers - Ontology Editors - Presentation Engines We reused the most basic and stable components like XML parsers (Xerces), relational databases (Postgres), application servers (JBoss) and presentation engines (TomCat). With respect to existing RDF parsers we were confronted with serious performance problems. Thus, we implemented a new one being compliant to the W3C specification. With respect to ontology editors we were confronted with the problem that each ontology modeling tool implements its own "specific data model", typically focusing on a specific representation paradigm. Thus, this results in the fact that it is impossible that one just takes a specific tool and uses it as a frontend for some specific backend software. Thus, the only thing that works is to provide import/export facilities. In our case we provide an import tool for Protege-based ontologies and RDFS ontologies in general. Personally I don't believe that in real life there will be ONE ontology tool. Is there one word processor, one HTML editor, one UML editor? The biggest question however is interoperability between these tools and that is why the work of W3C and its working group WebOnt is so important for the progress of the Semantic Web. Best, Alex
Received on Tuesday, 8 October 2002 09:18:34 UTC