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Re: [uos-convene] A common subset ontology?

To: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Upper Ontology Summit convention <uos-convene@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Chris Menzel <cmenzel@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 13:08:01 -0600
Message-id: <20060308190801.GU931@xxxxxxxx>
On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 09:49:33AM -0800, John Sowa wrote:
> Sorry, I misspoke.  I meant the typing of OWL DL.    (01)

So all you mean then is the ability to say more about classes in OWL DL?
There is typed *version* of OWL DL, at least not one recognized by W3C.    (02)

> JS>> ... But for performance, reliability, security, etc.,
> >> RDF & OWL are still infants compared to RDBs, which run
> >> the world economy, both now and for a long time to come.
> 
> CM> This is apples and oranges, isn't it?  Talking about
> > reliability and security, and maybe even performance, with
> > respect to RDF/OWL is a lot like talking about them wrt,
> > say, Peano Arithmetic.
> 
> I agree that expressivity depends on the logic of the SQL
> WHERE-clause vs the logic of RDF/OWL.  But when we are
> talking about which platform to choose for an application, 
> the surrounding support system becomes a major issue.    (03)

I certainly agree with you on that score.    (04)

> CM> RDF and OWL are theories in a certain language designed
> > to exploit the infrastructure of the web and, in the case
> > of OWL DL, the decidability of certain description logics.
> 
> Other than the choice of an XML-based syntax, there's nothing
> about RDF and OWL that makes them any better suited to the WWW
> than SQL.      (05)

Well, that's a pretty big "other than"!  Creating an XML-based language
for publishing ontologies in which names are URIs was genius.  And for
all its superficial ugliness, a standardized XML-based syntax cuts right
through religious wars about surface grammatical form.    (06)

> All the major vendors have integrated their RDB systems into the web
> servers, and they support SQL queries over data represented in web
> pages.    (07)

Well, being able to call a DB via a web server and actually having a
language tailored to the web are two quite different things -- as you
know, of course.  And of course there is work being done on such
languages in W3C.    (08)

-chris    (09)

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