WOWG: Report from WWW 2003 - OWL presentation/issues

My talk on OWL from the WWW conference is available at 
http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/0522-webont-hendler/
the talks from the Sem Web activity are linked to
http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/0522-swa-em/

I have spent a lot of my time here, surprise, surprise, discussing 
OWL with people (including a number of our LC commentors).  I will 
try to put some coherent thoughts together, but here's the first 
approximation -- we have to figure out how to explain the 
relationship between the species of OWL a lot better.  People are 
mostly okay with our design (once explained) and our decisions -- but 
they feel a couple of things must be changed

I think we need to spend some time discussing how we want to explain 
things (not redesign, not eliminating Lite or DL) -- we then need to 
change our documents to be consistent with that -- I think that will 
really mean only changing the explanations in Overview and Ref (and 
their reflection in Guide) and not S&AS (except maybe some small 
wording changes where we refer to things).  Test should also be okay 
as is.

Basically, the confusion is we have two different pictures we need to explain:


[OWL]
[RDFS]
[RDF]

and

[OWL Full]
[OWL DL]
[OWL Lite]

and right now the two don't line up quite right -- we need to convey 
something more like

[OWL]  <------->  [OWL DL / OWL Lite]
[RDFS]
[RDF]

which is the reality of our design, but not how it is explained in 
our docs (without careful reading).

There are many other things coming up, and I'm sure they will be 
discussed also, but I think a good explanation of the above, with 
appropriate words in the right places, will go a long way to 
addressing some of our LC comments, and lots of the concerns 
addressed to me by Advisory Committee members (who get to vote on our 
recommendation) - those are not disjoint sets.

Bottom line --
  are we thinking about a relationship between OWL (Full) and OWL DL 
that is more like the one from RDF to RDFS or the one from RDF to 
CC/PP.  Our design is more like the latter (OWL DL is a particular 
profile for using the OWL vocabulary) but our documents are more like 
the former (subset relations).

The way I presented it in the talk I cite at the top of this message 
(see slide 9) went over quite well, but may or may not be what we 
want to do -- so we do need to think about this.
  -JH



-- 
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 Saturday, 24 May 2003 10:38:47 UTC