RE: new names for OWL lite/fast/large

Agreed.  Perhaps

OWLET (but what does it stand for?)
OWL
OWL/RDF

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Hendler [mailto:hendler@cs.umd.edu]
Sent: Saturday, October 19, 2002 7:13 PM
To: Frank van Harmelen; www-webont-wg@w3.org
Subject: Re: new names for OWL lite/fast/large



At 11:30 PM +0200 10/18/02, Frank van Harmelen wrote:
>>ACTION Frank: collect suggestions for replacement name (for owl lite,
>>large, and fast)
>
>We should get this ball rolling if we want to use the new names in 
>our soon-to-be-released documents.
>
>Candidates so far:
>
>OWL Light: ?
>OWL fast: OWL/FOL-style
>OWL large: OWL/RDF-style
>
>Please consume the appropriate chemical substances
>(you could start with cafeine:-),
>let your creativity flow,
>and send me your suggestions.
>
>I will collect and report back.
>
>Frank.
>   ----

One thing I've learned in interacting with people about"The Web 
Ontology Language, OWL" is that on the web, being cute is a bad idea. 
People in the business world have little or no humor when it comes to 
this stuff.  Let's try hard not to be "funny" and risk either the 
language being ignored as a toy or the language developers renaming 
it to what THEY think are good names.

One software vendor, not participating in our group, suggested to me 
we should use
  OWL Lite
  OWL
  OWL Plus (or OWL Full)

or

  OWL Lite
  OWL DL (or logic - but they thought that Description Logics had been 
around a while and were possibly a good marketing hook)
  OWL

They felt that "lite" is actually a positive branding in the market 
(think about  BBedit-Lite(tm), Eudora-Lite(tm), etc.) in fact, one 
idea is they might give away tools for OWL Lite to create a market, 
and then sell more capable "OWL" tools -- much as the other tool 
vendors give away Lite versions and sell better ones.

They felt one of our versions should just be called OWL, it will make 
it easier for them to sell "OWL" projects - they didn't care too much 
which - if Fast Owl is called OWL, they would prefer the "bigger" one 
be called Plus or Full or something positive, if the other way (which 
they slightly preferred) they actually liked DL (or Description 
Logic) because they think that has some potential in the market 
theyr'e interested in

  This is a company that is thinking about entering the market w/some 
OWL stuff if they can convince their marketing people to go there
  -JH
p.s. They said okay to share the above, but not to identify the 
company or the business model they will use.

-- 
Professor James Hendler				  hendler@cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-731-3822 (Cell)
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler

Received on Monday, 21 October 2002 11:47:06 UTC