Response to JC3

Dear Jeremy, OWL working group,

This a response to your review of the RIF RDF and OWL compatibility document [1].

> This is a review of
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-rif-rdf-owl-20080415/
> on behalf of the OWL WG.
> We have one change request, and two further comments.

> A)
> Please change the sentence just before section 3.1

> [[
> This paves the way towards combination with OWL 2, which is envisioned
> to allow punning in all its syntaxes.
> ]]

> and the sentence from 3.2.2.3

> [[
> It is currently expected that OWL 2 will not define a semantics for
> annotation and ontology properties; therefore, the below definition
> cannot be extended to the case of OWL 2.
> ]]

> with a less definitive statement such as:

> [[
> In this document, we are using OWL to refer to OWL1. While OWL2 is still
> in development it is unclear how RIF will interoperate with it. At the
> time of writing, we believe that with OWL2 the support for punning may
> be beneficial, and that there might be particular problems in using
> section 3.2.2.3.
> ]]

The requested change will be implemented.

> B) On the editors note, at the end of section 1, we advise that RDF
> entailment is much less interesting than the others (simple, RDFS, D,
> OWL DL, OWL Full), and we would not expect opposition to RIF not
> supporting it.

Noted.

> C) Several participants in our group were unconvinced by the use of the
> "http://www.w3.org/2007/rif"^^rif:iri and "literal string@en"^^rif:text
> and found the deviation from the well-established notation for the RDF
> symbols a potential source of confusion to readers of this document,
> most of whom will also be readers of other Semantic Web documents from
> the W3C, and might expect a certain uniformity of style. Most of those
> present at our meeting were sympathetic to this point of view, but we
> felt it inappropriate to make a stronger comment on a sylistic matter.

It has been decided to use Turtle-style shortcut syntax for IRIs in the document; this should address some of your concerns. In addition, we will add an explanation (see [3]) about the correspondence between plain literals with language tags in RDF and constants in the symbol space rif:text in the document; there was not enough support in the working group for adding specific shortcut syntax for strings with language tags.

Best, Jos on behalf of the RIF working group

[3] http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wiki/SWC#Symbols_in_RIF_Versus_RDF.2FOWL_.28Informative.29