Re: Editors: consistent use of terms in webont docs

Chris - at one point it was suggested that we should have a glossary 
in Guide or ref.  I think the "use with consistent meaning" below 
could be turned into one very easily, and would avoid a lot of 
comments of the type "what do you mean by XXX, we use it to mean YYY" 
(a number of which we got in public-comments) - would you be willing 
to clean this up (just make each of the below a sentence, with 
pointers) that we could either put in a document or on the web site 
as the group prefers?
  -JH



At 17:07 -0500 1/12/03, Christopher Welty wrote:
>I realize after looking at my own notes on the editor's breakout that I
>didn't explain my notation.  Here it is in more readable form:
>
>The editors agreed that we should be more consistent about the terms used
>in the webont documents.  We identified common confusing and overloaded
>terms, and decided on a uniform meaning to be used in our documents.  Some
>of these decisions were simply arbitrary, some were driven by accepted use
>in other W3C groups.
>
>We also decided not to use the word "axiom" in the overview or the guide,
>but that it was OK in the reference document.  We didn't discuss the
>requirements document.
>
>Do Not Use:
>--------------------
>object
>class member
>knowledge base
>symbol
>term
>name
>
>
>Use with consistent meaning:
>-------------------------------------------
>resource: RDF resources
>instance: the relation between an individual and a class
>individual: an instance of a class
>ontology: the import closure of documents (Note that an ontology is
>ANYTHING WRITTEN IN OWL)
>document: in the web sense - something with a URL (Note that document and
>ontology should not be confused.  An ontology may span documents)
>element: in the XML sense
>entity: in the XML sense
>attribute: in the  XML sense
>node: in the RDF sense
>component or peice: for parts of a definition e.g. the arguments to
>intersection-of in a class definition
>URI reference: instead of "name of object"  for referring to something
>named
>Language Construct: things like OWL:Class, OWL:intersection.  These are
>also URI references.
>vocabulary: in the RDF model theory sense (a set of URI refs)
>class: in the OWL sense, as a language construct
>concept: informal term for the abstractions "in the world" that classes
>denote
>  type: in the RDF sense - the instance relation
>class expression: any use of the Class construct to express an axiom
>class definition:  INFORMAL term for talking about an owl:class tag and
>its pieces
>property defintion: INFORMAL term for talking about an owl:class tag and
>its pieces
>set: in the mathematical sense
>statement: An open tag, it's close tag, and everything in between.  E.g.
>"import statement"
>restriction: usually a peice of a class expression, a statement that
>expresses a constraint, local by default
>local restriction
>global restriction: reserved only for discussions of property domain and
>range
>constraint: Informal term for discussing the effect of a restriction
>
>
>-Chris
>
>Dr. Christopher A. Welty, Knowledge Structures Group
>IBM Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Dr.
>Hawthorne, NY  10532     USA
>Voice: +1 914.784.7055,  IBM T/L: 863.7055
>Fax: +1 914.784.6078, Email: welty@us.ibm.com


-- 
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 Sunday, 12 January 2003 17:44:32 UTC