Review of Guide

Mike and Chris,

At the F2F, I was actioned to review this document. I think it is almost
ready, but there are still a few things that need to be fixed. Some of
these are simple typos, others a little more substantial, but I think
still easily fixed.

1) We need an example of an OWL ontology that consists soley of
instances. These will be the most numerous OWL "ontologies" on the Web,
so we should at least show people how to do them. I think the easiest
way to do this is to take all of the Wine and Winery instances from
wine.owl and move them into a third file called winelist.owl. Then in
section 3.2.1 (Defining Individuals), we can add something like
"Ontologies that describe classes and properties may include
descriptions of individuals. However, many ontologies will consist soley
of individuals. For example, the wine list of a particular restaurant
may be represented as an ontology that describes all of the wines
available. In order to include the descriptions of the various styles of
wine, this ontology must import wine.owl. An example of this is
presented in winelist.owl."

2) Are the classes WineYear and VintageYear supposed to be the same
thing? In wine.owl, the VintageYear class is never defined, and the
WineYear class is only used to introduce Year1998. 

3) I don't think the Section 3.5 Ontology Versioning belongs under basic
definitions. I think it should be a section 6 that comes after complex
classes, and that Usage Examples should become section 7. The reason is
I think the guide reader will be interested in ontology mapping and
complex classes, before he or she is interested in ontology versioning.

4) Replace the first paragraph in the Ontology Versioning section
(currently 3.5) with the following two paragraphs. (and note the
correction of owl:Ontology capitalization in the 2nd parahraph)

Ontologies are like software, they will be maintained and thus will
change over time. However, once an ontology has been released, other
documents on the Web may come to depend on it (for example, by importing
it), and any changes may have significant impacts on these dependent
documents. Therefore, when a deployed ontology needs to be updated, the
original file should not be modified. Instead, the changes should be
made to a copy of the ontology which is assigned a different URL. OWL
provides some basic properties to describe relationships between
different versions of an ontology. Note that these properties need not
be used when changing an ontology that is in its design phase and has
not been relased yet. In those situations, there are either no
dependencies or the dependencies can be managed internally, so standard
document or software version management techniques may be used.

Within a owl:Ontology element (discussed above), it is possible to link
to a previous version of the ontology being defined. owl:priorVersion is
a standard tag intended to provide this link, and can be used to track
the version history of an ontology.

5) Sect. 4: Ontology mapping, para 3:
Tool support will almost certainly be required consistency. 

should this be:

Tool support will almost certainly be required to maintain consistency. 

6) Sect. 4.2 sameIndividualAssameAs
The statement that sameAs "is available mainly for backwards
compatibility" is a little odd. Backwards compatible with what? This is
the first version of owl, and I don't think DAML+OIL had sameAs. I think
it would be better to say "sameAs is a less verbose synonym of
sameIndividualAs."

7) Sect. 4.3, AllDifferent example
change rdf:parsetType to rdf:parseType (remove extra 't')


"Smith, Michael K" wrote:
> 
> Ok.  All changes that Chris and I are aware of have been made.
> Glossary added, but not yet linked to other documents.
> Not yet passed through RDF, HTML, or pubrules checker.
> Will do so in the next few days.
> 
> http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/WebOnt/guide-src/Guide.html
> 
> - Mike
> 
> Michael K. Smith, Ph.D., P.E.
> EDS - Austin Innovation Centre
> 98 San Jacinto, #500
> Austin, TX  78701
> 
> * phone: +01-512-404-6683
> * mailto:michael.smith@eds.com

Received on Tuesday, 21 January 2003 11:51:39 UTC