Comments on Feature Synopsis

These coments are based on the December 31, 2002 draft at 
http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm/webont/OWLFeatureSynopsis.htm


Summary: This document is in very good shape technically, but can be 
improved to better explain the three sublangauges (with very little 
new writing).


Big changes:

Basically, this document has one real problem.  It states "Since OWL 
DL and OWL Full have include (sic) the same vocabulary, they are 
handled together in this document."  Other than the grammatical 
error, I think it is a mistake to handle it this way, especially as 
we could make this document even more valuable by having it explain 
the distinction between DL and Full, as I will document below.

Here's how I propose we fix this:

0 - we rename the document to "Web Ontology Language (OWL) Feature 
Synopsis Version 1.0" (deleting the sublanguage names)

1 - abstract will need to delete the last line since it will now cover Full.

2- last paragraph of intro will need rewriting

3 - Section 2.2 is renamed OWL DL Synopsis and the first line is 
changed to read.  The list of OWL DL constructs that are in addition 
to those of OWL Lite are given below.

4 - A section 2.3 is Added which reads as follows:

   2.3 OWL Full Synopsis

   OWL Full uses the same vocabulary as OWL DL, but relaxes some restrictions on
   the use of some features.  These are described in Section 5.0 below.

5 - Section Four is renamed to "Incremental Language Description of OWL DL"
and the first line changes to read "The OWL DL vocabulary..."


6 - A new top level section, to become section 5.0 is added.  In this 
section we say that OWL Full uses the same vocabulary as OWL DL, but 
relaxes two features of OWL DL.  It then lists the following two 
things<ul>:

<li><b><i>InverseFunctionalProperty (datatypes):</i></b> OWL Full 
allows inverseFunctional Property to be applied to datatype 
properties.  (and a short description that this is desirable for 
allowing database-key like functionality ) >/li>

<li><b>Classes as Instances:</b></i> A short description of what this 
is and when it could be desirable.  The words on this in the 
requirements document (this was a requirement) coupled with a simple 
example (either from wine or the one on airplane flights we heard at 
first f2f)
</ul>

7 - Summary becomes section 6, first line is changed to read "... a 
synopsis of OWL Lite, OWL DL and OWL Full."


I believe the entire change above only requires two new paragraphs to 
be written, and would greatly stengthen the language.  (I will 
volunteer to take a stab at the inverseFunctionalProperty, and 
suspect Guus might be willing to do class as instances)

-----
other comments

The intro should be reworded a bit - in addition to fixing the last 
paragraph as above, a little more care needs to be taken w/respect to 
describing our relation with RDF Schema and citing appropriately.

section 3.6 OWL Lite Header Information is out of date.  My 
suggestion is we either drop the details from that section (simply 
say there exists various kinds of header information, summarize and 
point at Ref) or else extend it to include backwardCompatible and the 
like.

The extralogical features for deprecation are not mention in this 
document - again, either mention and point to Ref, or have a real 
description (these could be folded into the above)


-- 
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 Wednesday, 1 January 2003 16:57:50 UTC