Re: proposed reply for Semantics and Abstract Syntax (and some general OWL Lite, CR, & implementation) comments

Peter - a few things - snipping the rest:


At 3:27 PM -0400 5/30/03, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
>[ Proposed response for
>   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webont-comments/2003May/0069.html
>]
>
>
>>  I put this out as a caution against further second guessing. While I'm
>>  *afraid* it'll turn out to be merely pointless or annoying, I have no
>>  real evidence. People are funny.
>
>It may indeed turn out that the OWL Lite syntax limitations are not
>correct.  No one gets the syntax right on the first (or even second or
>third or ...) try.  However, it should be relatively painless to fiddle
>with the OWL Lite syntax.

hmm, this make sense in context, but I worry about it getting quoted 
out of context (not by Bijan, but by someone else) - could we say 
something like:

The WG has tried it's hardest to to get the syntax and the 
limitations right. We expect that it is possible that slight changes 
to the boundaries of OWL Lite may be needed over time, but at this 
point we believe this is the best tradeoff.

(or something like that)



>>  3) Given that we're already pushing the expressivity/computational
>>  complexity front, I would very much like to have various role
>>  constructors, roughly what gets into ALC* or ALCtrans, though I
>>  understand that transitive closure isn't addable while preserving
>>  decidability (though *that* would be, for me, a more attractive OWL
>>  Lite, i.e., something I could add transitive closure to and retain
>>  decidability). CardinalityQ, too. I miss it.
>
>There is the possibilty of qualified cardinalities coming back.  The
>working group has re-opened an issue on this.  One sticky point with
>qualified cardinalities is their syntax in triples.
>

no, the WG voted to postpone QCRs.  You should just point him to that 
in the meeting minutes:

We decided:
RESOLVED: - Postpone the a full treatment of Qualified Cardinality 
restrictions.
as recorded in: 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2003May/0120.html


>>  4) Get the damn thing out the door.
>>
>>  I'm not clear that a long CR for implementation is either useful or
>>  wise. No, I'm fairly clear it isn't. The language seems perfectly
>>  reasonable, if not my ideal. It fixes loads of important bugs in
>>  DAML+OIL, which, i'll point out, has been a perfectly servicable
>>  language for many people and purposes. Let us play with this for a few
>>  years and THEN we can tweak it further.
>


your answer here is much more than it need to be.  I think
"Thanks for that comment"
would be a better response -- again, quoted out of context lines like 
"I expect that there will remain bugs in the documents forever" would 
not be something I'd like to see surface on the AC forum email during 
our PR vote...



-- 
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)
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Received on Friday, 30 May 2003 17:00:43 UTC