On Oct 24, 2008, at 4:20 PM, Ed Barkmeyer wrote: (01)
> John F. Sowa wrote:
>
>> EB> But DL's modern academic claim to fame is the computationally
>>> bounded behavior of tableaux reasoners.
>>
>> That may be useful for writing PhD dissertations, but UML is far
>> more important for commercial applications.
>
> I did say "academic" claim to fame. But what motivated the choice of
> DLs in the SemWeb community was the predictability. The importance of
> OWL to commercial applications is the cache of W3C, and the presence
> of
> many supporting tools (of varying quality).
>
> You are right about UML, but XML Schema is even more important in many
> commercial applications. And the great advantage of OWL is that it is
> vastly better than XML Schema as an information modeling language.
> And
> as a consequence of bearing the magic W3C stamp of approval, and being
> of academic repute, OWL is gradually supplanting XML Schema as an
> information modeling language in the (otherwise illiterate) XML
> communities. And that can only be good. (02)
Do you evidence that OWL is supplanting XML Schema as an information
modeling language? What is the criteria for "vastly better here"? (03)
I wasn't aware that this was the case. I would also be slightly
worried if it were, the two standards occupy related niches, but the
differences are significant enough to cause real problems when OWL is
used as a schema language. The major trap here is the open/closed
world distinction. Most people using XSD/Relax/etc have closed world
requirements, conversely, those using OWL wisely have open world
requirements. IMHO Possibly the worst thing you can do is treat OWL as
a kind of closed world UML-like object modeling language - yet this is
what many people do. It inevitably turns out that OWL is being used
where something like XML Schema should have been used instead. There
are documented cases in the bioinformatics world - for example, the
BioPAX "ontology" intended for exchanging biochemical pathway data. (04)
Note that OWL2 has an XML syntax, which is defined in XSD, not OWL. (05)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
Subscribe/Config: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
To Post: mailto:ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (06)
|