WebOnt response to your issue timbl-03

Brian-
  The Web Ontology Working Group was asked for our opinion on your 
issue timbl-03, the removing of seemingly redundant rdf:list triples 
in various places.
  Our WG discussion (minutes in [1]) centered on two issues - First, 
we tried to decide whether this would "break" our design in the sense 
of causing us significant technical work and require opening new 
issues or reopening existing ones. Second, we discussed whether this 
change would be consistent with the design goals of OWL and with the 
current language design.
  Our WG did not reach strong consensus on either of the above, but 
did seem to feel that while it was probably the case that removing 
rdf:list would not break our design, it would cause our group to do 
extra work and would conflict with some of the aspects of our current 
design.
   In particular, a number of places in our documents we would have to 
say things like
    "ALL ?x (except for rdf:list - see <link>) MUST have a ?y"
which would also mean implementors would have to have appropriate 
checks in their code in multiple places - making it marginally more 
complex.
  Thus, it appears to be the case that our WG would be happiest with 
the status quo and generally prefers that you not make the change, 
but we would probably not file an objecting comment on behalf of the 
WG if the change was made.
  Putting it more informally in WG terms -- if I had to represent my 
group's opinion I would vote against during a straw poll, but abstain 
(as opposed to objecting) if it went to a vote.

  - Jim Hendler on behalf of WebOnt WG.

[please feel free to point to this message in your group's email, I 
didn't want to crosspost so as to keep followup threads separate]





[1]
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2003May/0271.html
-- 
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 Friday, 16 May 2003 09:00:21 UTC