On 23/6/09 11:01, Martin Hepp (UniBW) wrote:
And Michael, please be frank - there is a tendency in the LOD community
which goes along the lines of "OWL and DL-minded SW research has proven
obsolete anyway, so we LOD guys and girls just pick and use the bits and
pieces we like and don't care about the rest".
What made the Web so powerful is that its Architecture is extremely
well-thought underneath the first cover of simplicity.
One of those principles is partial understanding - the ability to do
something useful without understanding everything...
http://www.w3.org/1999/04/WebData#epu
This attitude is deeply ingrained in the RDF scene, as well as (in a
way) standardised in the Full flavour of OWL. It may explain why LOD
folk might *seem* to be disrespectfully picking and choosing which bits
of OWL to care about. It's part of the culture around here, and also
part of the overall SW design. In FOAF for example, we used
daml:UnambiguousProperty before OWL existed, and consuming application
code made real practical use of it for data merging and identity
reasoning without necessarily having a complete understanding of all of
DAML+OIL (and later, OWL). This is because the semantics of that
property class made certain guarantees that were concrete and
immediately useful. The fact that the OWL specs can be used this way is,
in my opinion, fantastic ... people find their way in, piece by piece,
each step motivated by concrete needs. Taken as a whole they're rather
large to swallow...
cheers,
Dan
