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Ed,
I couldn't resist commenting on this remark:
> But Sjir does raise a valid question: Show us an explicit
> business application that a comprehensible first-order ontology,
> or an OWL/DL model, and its associated reasoning engines can
> solve and that a conceptual schema and its associated reasoning
> engines cannot solve. That is an entirely different question,
> and it is one we must answer if we are to sell ontology as
> a true improvement on 'information modeling'.
I believe
that for most software development, the UML diagrams
are a *better*
ontology language than OWL. Just the class
diagrams, by themselves,
provide the most useful part of OWL.
The other UML diagrams support
other subsets of FOL in a way
that is much easier to specify than
OWL.
My recommendation is to use the UML diagrams (with
extensions)
to support ontology tools. Then the results could be
exported
to a wide variety of other logic-based languages (including
OWL). That would be an excellent way to kill two birds with one
stone:
(a) enable traditional software developers to integrate
their
work with the Semantic Web, and (b) enable SW developers to
integrate their work with traditional software technology.
As
I've said many times, my major complaint about the Semantic
Web is
that they ignored the tools and technologies that software
developers
had been using for years -- including most of the
technology that
they had been using successfully for commercial
web sites.
John
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