Re: WOWG: Report from WWW 2003 - OWL presentation/issues

On May 24, Jim Hendler writes:
> 
> 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).

The reality of our design is more like:

    [OWL Full]
    /        \
[RDFS]      [OWL DL]
    \       [OWL Lite]
     \       /
[FO fragment of RDFS]

If you want to distinguish RDF and RDFS then, to be precise, you have
to go to:

    [OWL Full]
    /        \
[RDFS]      [OWL DL]
 |   \      [OWL Lite]
 |    -------  |
 |           \ |
[RDF]       [FO fragment of RDFS]
    \       /
[FO fragment of RDF]


Perhaps this goes some way to clearing up any confusion.

Ian

[snip]

Received on Wednesday, 28 May 2003 14:58:35 UTC