OWL 1.1 documents - please review
It is no secret, and in fact is a matter of public record, that although I am a member of the W3C’s OWL Working Group, I am not very happy with the language and its design. I worry that we are adding a lot of complexity to the language for a small amount of functionality gain (if any), that the work is being motivated by theoretical issues rather than user need, and that a small fragment of the growing OWL community is adding significant complexity to the language for very specific representational properties that follow from the Description Logic literature, rather than from a rich exploration of the many different roles a Web ontology language could have in the growing Semantic Web info-ecology (i.e. a world of mixed expressivity with heterogeneity among many different reasoners). The three documents that have been released are somewhat difficult to penetrate - at the end of this blog I have a list of the old and new OWL vocabulary terms and as you can see, despite the claim to a minor version number, the OWL 1.1 design almost doubles the size of the language.
Anyway, here’s your chance to prove me wrong if you think I’m mistaken, or to comment on the overall effort if you think I might have a point. The documents have been released and there is a call for reviews - the easiest way to get there is to follow the links from the W3C news item about the publications. Technical comments are, of course, welcome and needed, but since this is the first release of these documents with this wide of a dissemination, it is useful for us also to know if we appear to be addressing users’ needs and if the language design appears to be going in the right direction.
- Jim Hendler
p.s. Before I get accused of trying to sabotage the groups efforts or anything like that, let me point out that the WG’s mailing list archives are public, the history of my comments, the arguments against them, and the rest of the give and take, is all a matter of public record - and I encourage interested users to explore that literature and see from where the different points of views arise. You’d be just as mistaken to take my word on this as to take anyone else’s.
=== New OWL vocabulary, may be a slight variation from the published one - thanks to Peter Patel-Schneider for this list (which I have edited slightly for clarity from his original email)- see the thread there for details===
ORIGINAL OWL:
owl:AnnotationProperty owl:Class owl:DataRange owl:DatatypeProperty owl:FunctionalProperty owl:InverseFunctionalProperty owl:ObjectProperty owl:Ontology owl:Restriction owl:SymmetricProperty owl:TransitiveProperty owl:allValuesFrom owl:cardinality owl:complementOf owl:differentFrom owl:disjointWith owl:equivalentClass owl:equivalentProperty owl:hasValue owl:imports owl:intersectionOf owl:inverseOf owl:maxCardinality owl:minCardinality owl:onProperty owl:oneOf owl:sameAs owl:someValuesFrom owl:unionOf owl:AllDifferent Alternative mapping for DifferentIndividuals axiom owl:distinctMembers owl:DeprecatedClass Used in special "annotations" owl:DeprecatedProperty owl:OntologyProperty Used for ontology properties owl:backwardCompatibleWith Built-in OWL DL annotation properties - OK owl:priorVersion owl:incompatibleWith owl:versionInfo owl:Nothing Built-in OWL Classes - OK owl:Thing ADDED IN OWL 1.1 owl11:AsymmetricProperty Typing triples owl11:FunctionalDataProperty owl11:FunctionalObjectProperty owl11:IrreflexiveProperty owl11:ReflexiveProperty owl11:Individual owl11:declaredAs owl11:equivalentDataProperty Disambiguation for EquivalentProperties axiom owl11:equivalentObjectProperty owl11:subDataPropertyOf Disambiguation for SubProperty axiom owl11:subObjectPropertyOf owl11:DataRestriction Disambiguation for restriction construct owl11:ObjectRestriction owl11:dataPropertyDomain Disambiguation for domain construct owl11:objectPropertyDomain owl11:dataPropertyRange Disambiguation for range construct owl11:objectPropertyRange owl11:Axiom Annotations of axioms owl11:NegativeDataPropertyAssertion For new OWL 1.1 constructs owl11:NegativeObjectPropertyAssertion owl11:SelfRestriction owl11:onClass owl11:onDataRange owl11:disjointDataProperties owl11:disjointObjectProperties owl11:disjointUnionOf owl11:inverseObjectPropertyExpression owl11:<XSD facet>