OWL or OLD?
July 22nd, 2008
I just noticed the “OWL 2 Web Ontology Language: Requirements” document from the OWL Working Group. Interestingly, while the “W” in OWL stands for “Web”, I didn’t see any use case from web applications in the usual sense. As the leading requirements are from the need for domain knowledge bases, I would suggest the name of the new language, instead of OWL 2, to be Ontology Language of Domains (OLD) — Just kidding. OWL claims to be needed by common web users, but such users are surprisingly under-represented in the specification process. We have already seen many specially designed, highly expressive, but, narrowly applied languages in the old KR schools. Do we need to invent yet another one here, again?
Jie