- From: Jim Hendler <hendler@cs.umd.edu>
- Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2003 13:12:56 -0500
- To: "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>, jos.deroo@agfa.com
- Cc: www-webont-wg@w3.org
My comments on the so-called "Social meaning issue" (as chair - see caveats in my note of Jan 20, 12:30 EST [1]) -- note also that the comments below should be very strictly construed as only addressing the state of our DOCUMENTS and not in any way commenting on any other actions the group may wish to take with respect to this issue The issue of social meaning is clearly a difficult one, with strongly held beliefs in both directions. I expect it to be a much-discussed item of RDF Core's Last Call, and I encourage members of our WG, as individuals and/or as representatives of their member organizations (when appropriate) to weigh in. That said, I believe that our DOCUMENTS do NOT actually need any changes to address this issue, and that we are largely uneffected by this decision with respect to publishing - therefore I propose our group simply not address this issue in the form of any specific action before going to Last Call. My rationale for the above is (based on the many messages in this thread) i. It appears to me that the primary difficulty brought up with social meaning is that it can occur in the comment fields of rdf documents in natural language (i.e. what [2] refers to as "opaque to logical reasoners"). However, these fields do not use the OWL namespace and are not mandated for use in OWL. Thus, the OWL ontology creator is expected to read theappropriate RDF and/or RDFS documents before using any features from those languages. An OWL ontology document creator who does not wish to embrace the "social meaning" issue is never mandated to use rdfs: features that contribute to anything other than those necessary for the logical meaning of OWL (c.f. rdfs:property and the like). Thus, this issue, while important to those in the OWL WG as individuals, is not mandated by OWL use and does not necessitate action with respect to our DOCUMENTS. ii. the second aspect of the RDF meaning as defined in [2] is that there is an expectation that by publishing something on the Semantic Web (as on the HTML-powered web) one takes responsibility for it. I haven't yet heard anyone proposing that this wouldn't be the case in the formal meaning of OWL and, again, it seems to me that no action is needed here - those wishing not to take legal responsibility for what they say in their ontologies are not forced to publish them on the open net (same as those wishing to avoid legal responsibility for what they say in their HTML documents - i.e. it is a publishing issue, not a document language issue). Again, it appears to me that our current DOCUMENTS do not need to take a stand on this issue either. Please note - the above are not intended to be contentious or to reflect my personal opinions - I've tried to be as objective as I can. Basically, I am suggesting as chair that whether or not RDF Core ends up containing section 4.0 in [2] (the "Meaning of RDF" section) does not immediately impact OUR DOCUMENTS - which is my primary concern with respect to moving to Last Call. Also Note: the decision as to whether the group wishes to make a consensus statement with respect to this issue during the RDF Core LC period is not addressed pro or con in the above) [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2003Jan/0317.html [2] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/RDFCore/TR/WD-rdf-concepts-20030117/ (section 4.2) -- 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, 20 January 2003 13:13:10 UTC