Re: concerning lite, fast, large versions of OWL

Evan Wallace wrote:

> You wrote:
> > Since OWL Light (still wanting a better name) should have ease of
> > implementation as an important design criterion, it would make no sense
> > to  use the "RDF-style" for OWL Light, since this would make
> > implementation of  reasoners (and many other tools, e.g. editors,
> > visualisers etc) much harder.
>             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> I understand about the reasoners (and that alone is sufficient reason for
> me to agree with "OWL Light < OWL/FOL-style < OWL/RDF-style").  However,
> how does employing the RDF-style for OWL Light cause other tools to be
> much harder to implement?

I didn't make my point very clear, sorry. What I tried to say was that
having classes-as-instances also makes life harder for other tools than 
reasoners. As example, take a visualisor. In RDF/FOL-style, it's pretty 
obvious how to visualise a hierarchy of classes. Visualising a hierarchy 
where classes can be both subclasses and members of other classes is harder 
(not impossible, of course). Same for editors: Protege has the ability to 
treat classes as objects, but this considerably complicates both the 
interface and the conceptual model underlying the interface.

These points are "soft" compared to the much harder, formal fact that 
reasonsers for OWL/RDF-style will be much harder then for OWL/FOL-style.

You also wrote:

> >View (1) was discussed at the F2F (when a number of people were in another
> >meeting discussing wine ontologies); there was widespread agreement among
> >the people present at that discussion that (1) was a much better option
> >than including classes-as-instances in OWL Light.
>
> I was unaware that such a discussion took place.  Thank you for bringing
> us all onto the same page.

It was only an informal discussion. Since so many people were in the breakout 
group, we felt we couldn't really make any formal decisions on this issue.

I was charged with an action point to raise this. Thankfully, Chris' email 
did exactly that.

Frank.
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Received on Thursday, 17 October 2002 10:36:11 UTC