Proposed response to http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webont-comments/2003May/0053.html

Brian

Thanks for your comments[1].

[[
owlref-rdfcore-relationship-to-RDF

RDFCore are concerned about the clarity in the OWL specifications of what
RDF is legal OWL DL and OWL lite.  This seems to be described only in S+AS
which is a highly technical document and is likely to be inaccessible to
many.  On reviewing the reference document some significant restrictions
were not apparent to the RDFCore reviewer.  We cannot be confident,
therefore, that other restrictions we would care about, have not been
missed.

RDFCore requests that the specifications be amended to include a
description of necessary conditions for a RDF document to be in OWL DL and
OWL Lite.  This description should be as accurate as possible consistent
with a goal of it being comprehensible to a majority of the community.

Such a description may bring to light further issues.
]]

An appendix has been added to the OWL Reference Doc (Appendix E: Rules
of Thumb for OWL Ontologies [2]). This appendix is intended to address
precisely this issue: which RDF graphs are legal OWL DL and OWL
Lite. Of course this is not intended as an normative description --
the finer details are still contained within the S+AS. However, the
appendix presents some general rules which, if followed, should ensure
that graphs are legal DL/Lite. Rather than providing a formal
characterisation of DL/Lite, one can view the philosophy of the rules
as "if you follow these, you'll be ok.".

Please respond, copying public-webont-comments@w3.org, as to whether
you are satisfied with this response.

Sean Bechhofer

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webont-comments/2003May/0053.html
[2] http://www.daml.org/2002/06/webont/owl-ref-proposed#app-DLinRDF




-- 
Sean Bechhofer
seanb@cs.man.ac.uk
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~seanb

Received on Tuesday, 17 June 2003 05:22:20 UTC