- From: Jeremy Carroll <jjc@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
- Date: Sat, 13 Mar 2004 09:34:31 +0000
- To: Ian Horrocks <horrocks@cs.man.ac.uk>
- Cc: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>, www-webont-wg@w3.org
Ian Horrocks wrote: > The W in OWL stands for Web. Some may argue that Web does not imply > RDF. Agreed - there was a potential choice that the WebOnt group could have made. The Web part does require: - working out how to include OWL in HTML - working on the relationship between OWL and XML - having some internationalization capabilities for OWL - understanding the relationship between URLs for documents and URIs for resources while RDF has often introduced potentially unnecessary difficulties in all of the above, there is at least progress on all topics. The political side is not just clubbiness or people but also comes down to money. The HP Semantic Web group, for instance, would not, I believe, have felt able to resource work in two independent approaches to knowledge on the Web - given our prior investment in RDF we would have pulled out of WebOnt - not out of sour grapes but simply as good business of not spreading our effort too thin. Technically OWL without RDF could have been a better solution, but it would have cost a lot more if we had wanted to get the relationships with other Web technologies progressing. So a different possible tactic would to have devised a migration path from RDF to a (non-RDF) OWL and persuaded enough RDF users that they should migrate ... sounds like a barrel of laughs. Jeremy
Received on Saturday, 13 March 2004 04:34:54 UTC