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3/17/2004
10:07 AM
Communication from: ( remarks are indicated by “[reply to J (0)]” )
J
Professor of Computer Science
(edited)
Paul-
Your long and well-written commentary shows such a fundamental misunderstanding of what RDF and OWL actually are for and what the intent and uses of the Semantic Web are.
I am truly sorry that you have refused to shed your misconceptions of the language, which are sharply different from the reality, despite our previous discussions and emails.
You are certainly welcome to your opinions, but your concept of "universality" is so at odds with my world view (and that of most of us working on the Semantic Web) that I don't even know where to start .
To see my opinions about what this work is all about, and why I believe it will succeed, may I point you at any of the following:
The Scientific American article Tim Berners-Lee, Ora Lassila and I wrote introducing the Semantic Web:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00048144-10D2-1C70-84A9809EC588EF21
“[reply to Hendler
(2)]”
The later article Tim, Eric Miller and I wrote that explains the use case for the Semantic Web technology in respect to database integration and Web Services:
http://www.w3.org/2002/07/swint
My IEEE article on agents and the Semantic Web explains my approach to shared and distributed ontologies, and to the integration of Semantic Web and services:
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler/AgentWeb.html
The FAQ for OWL, which is short, but makes clear why it is different from other ontology languages (all of which is ignored by Paul in his message)
http://www.w3.org/2003/08/owlfaq
The Use Cases and requirements document for OWL, which has been reviewed by the 400 member organizations of the W3C and is now part of the OWL Recommendation
http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-webont-req-20040210/
and, of course, for details of OWL see the OWL Recommendation documents that are available on the W3C technical reports page:
http://www.w3.org/TR/
[reply to Hendler
(3)]
And in answer to your question as to whether we are making progress, you don't have to take my opinion -- see the opinions of the two-dozen companies and organizations that published public testimonials to their support of RDF and OWL - if this is, as Paul calls it, an "unworkable solution," then a lot of major companies (IBM, Sun, HP, Fujitsu, Nokia, etc.) must be wrong:
http://www.w3.org/2004/01/sws-testimonial
-Jim Hendler