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Responses to Comments

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Third Round

Executive Summary

In this round the technical documents were published as Candidate Recommendations and the user facing documents as Last Call Working Drafts (see Deliverables). A total of 21 comments were received, most of them regarding minor editorial errors and/or omissions. One comment (from Holger Knublauch) asked for an OWL 2 vocabulary file, a draft of which has now been produced (see http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/Owl2DotOwlDevel).

All comments have been responded to, and all commenters (who bothered to reply) have declared themselves to be satisfied with the WG's response (one, JH1, with some reservations, but our follow-up reply did not elicit any response).

Comments requiring responses

  • Key to columns
    • Owner: WG member who is addressing issues and/or drafting response email
    • Response: links to response email and to subsequent acknowledgment from commenter

Comments on OWL documents
Comment Date What Author Wiki Page Owner Status Response/ack Affected Documents
1 13-Jun-09 Turtle syntax tweak in OWL 2 Primer, & addition of NTriples Danny Ayers DA1 pfps ACK - OK RtDA1 RtDA1-ack None
2 13-Jun-09 rdfs:isDefinedBy and version IRI Simon Reinhardt SR1 pfps ACK - OK RtSR1, RtSR1-ack None
3 1-Jul-09 Error in OWL-XML example Dmitry Repchevsky DR1 Markus ACK - OK RtDR1, RtDR1-ack Primer
4 2-Jul-09 ObjectPropertyDomain doesn't inherit from ObjectPropertyAxiom Dmitry Repchevsky DR2 Bijan ACK - OK RtDR2 RtDR2-ack XML Serialization
5, 6 13-Jul-09 Request for OWL 2 vocabulary file Holger Knublauch; Tim Lebo concurring HK1 Michael Schneider ACK - OK RtHK1, RtHK1-ack None
7 20-Jul-09 Explain profile acronyms and relationships Gioele Barabucci GB1 Ian ACK - OK RtGB1, RtGB1-ack Profiles, Primer, New Features
8 30-Jul-09 Imports, deprication, profiles and arithmetic Jeff Heflin JH1 Ian ACK - partly OK RtJH1 RtJH1-ack RtJH1-2 None
9 31-Jul-09 MIME type registration Dan Connolly DC1 Sandro Hawke ACK - OK RtDC1, RtDC1-ack Syntax, XML Serialization
10 12-Aug-09 NF&R -- editorial Daniel Barclay DB1 Christine ACK - OK RtDB1, RtDB1-ack New Features
11 12-Aug-09 Overview -- editorial Daniel Barclay DB2 Ian ACK - OK RtDB2, RtDB2-ack Overview
12 12-Aug-09 FS&S -- editorial Petr Kremen PK1 Boris ACK - OK RtPK1, RtPK1-ack Syntax
13 31-Aug-09 Absolute IRIs -- editorial Daniel Barclay DB3 Ian ACK - OK RtDB3, RtDB3-ack Syntax
14 31-Aug-09 FS&S -- editorial Daniel Barclay DB4 Ian ACK - OK RtDB4, RtDB4-ack, RtDB4a, RtDB4a-ack Syntax
15, 16 02-Sep-09 FS&S -- editorial Daniel Barclay DB5 Boris Sent 26 Sep RtDB5 RtDB5-ack, RtDB5-2 Syntax
17 09-Sep-09 FS&S -- overly overloaded grammar/object terminology Daniel Barclay DB6 Ian Sent 15 September RtDB6, RtDB6-ack Syntax
18 09-Sep-09 FS&S -- editorial Daniel Barclay DB7 Ian Sent 15 September RtDB7 Syntax
19 11-Sep-09 FS&S -- editorial Daniel Barclay DB8 Ian ACK - OK RtDB8 RtDB8-ack Syntax
20, 22 11-Sep-09 FS&S -- editorial Daniel Barclay DB9 Ian ACK - OK RtDB9, RtDB9a, RtDB9a-ack, RtDB9a-ack2 Syntax
21 15-Sep-09 rdf:plainLiteral -- editorial Daniel Barclay DB10 Ian ACK - OK RtDB10 RtDB10-ack rdf:plainLiteral
23 23-Sep-09 Primer -- editorial Luigi Selmi LS1 Ian ACK - OK RtLS1, RtLS1-ack Primer
24 24-Sep-09 General -- editorial Mark Montgomery MM1 Ian ACK - OK RtMM1, RtMM1-ack None
25 30-Sep-09 NF&R -- editorial Simon Reinhardt Christine ACK - OK RtSR1, RtSR1-ack NF&R
26 01-Oct-09 XML -- editorial Paul Tyson PT1 Bijan ACK - OK RtPT1, RtPT1-ack XML Ser.
27 05-Oct-09 Primer -- editorial Olivier Corby OC1 Sebastian ACK - OK RtOC1, RtOC1-ack Primer
28 15-Sep-09 rdf:plainLiteral -- editorial Daniel Barclay DB11 Jie ACK - OK RtDB11, RtDB11-ack rdf:plainLiteral
29 15-Oct-09 Individuals in OWL/XML Thorsten Liebig TL1 Boris ACK - OK RtTL1, RtTL1-ack None
30 17-Oct-09 Typo in OWL/XML examples Marko Luther ML1 Sebastian ACK - OK RtML1, RtML1-ack Primer
31 17-Oct-09 Namespace declaration in OWL/XML Marko Luther ML2 Markus ACK - OK RtML2, RtML2-ack Primer
32 22-Oct-09 Typo in OWL/XML examples Kaarel Kaljurand KK1 Sebastian ACK - OK RtKK1, RtKK1-ack Primer


Comments on rdf:text
Comment Date What Author Wiki Page Owner Status Response/ack Affected Documents

Second Round

Executive Summary

In the first Last Call round the Working Group received 74 comments. Many of these comments, even those that requested changes,were complementary about the work of the Working Group, and included statements such as:

  • "In my opinion, OWL 2 is a great improvement over OWL 1 since it incorporates several expressive means which are relevant for applications." (Jan Hladik, SAP Research)
  • "we've chosen to use OWL 2 RL as the basis for our products" (Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, ExperienceOn)
  • "I'd like to express my interest in and support for the proposed extensions to be incorporated in OWL2" (Jeremy Rogers, NHS Connecting for Health)
  • "I'd like to express my interest for this great work extending OWL. I'm sure this will make easier the language usage." (Maurice Israel, Thales Communication)
  • "Great to have a document on the Manchester OWL syntax", "The documents on the different language profiles is extremely welcome", "I welcome the introduction of QCRs, Property Chains, asymmetric properties, disjoint properties, keys, annotation properties, extended data types, disjoint union (a great space saver)" (John Goodwin, Ordnance Survey Research)
  • "I'd like to express my support for the proposed extensions and profiles described in OWL 2 Web Ontology Language New Features and Rationale" (Chris Wroe, BT Health)
  • "the rationale for the new features seem well-founded and some of these features will be of potential benefit to BT in our work with customers, particularly (but not necessarily exclusively) in the health sector" (John Davies, BT Innovate)
  • "Our Health Services division is investigating the use of OWL 2 for knowledge-driven architectures to build the next generation of IT solutions for health-care. From our perspective, the change from OWL 1 to OWL 2 constitutes a welcome step in the right direction." (Sam Brandt, SIEMENS Medical Solutions)
  • "KR-WG encourages the further evolution of OWL 2 and believes that it will open new perspectives in making biomedical data and knowledge interoperable and computable." (Stefan Schulz & Ronald Cornet, AMIA Working Group of Formal Biomedical Knowledge Representation)
  • "I have been using the OWL 2 Manchester syntax in Protégé 4 beta almost exclusively and find very few gaps in general." (Cecil O. Lynch, Ontoreason)
  • "I greatly appreciate the many improvements offered by OWL 2 and see many benefits for the Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group", "A few of my favorite new features are: Property chain inclusion ... Local reflexivity ... Qualified Cardinality ... The new reflexive, irreflexive, and asymmetric property axioms", "Thank you for your excellent work!" (M. Scott Marshall, W3C HCLS Interest Group)
  • "We support the inclusion of all of the new language features F1-F15 in section 2 of the New Features doc." (Frank van Harmelen, Semantic Web Group at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)


Of the 74 comments, 10 were simply expressing approval and did not require any response, 2 were withdrawn (the commenter realising that the imagined problem actually wasn't one) and 2 required no action (the comments having related to already fixed problems). Of the remaining 60 comments, 53 were responded to by the Working Group to the acknowledged satisfaction of the commenters, 2 have been superseded by comments in the second Last Call round, and 5 were responded to by the Working Group, but the response was not acknowledged by the commenters (in spite of reminders).

Looking more closely at the 5 comments where the Working Group's responses were not acknowledged, 3 of these can be considered "satisfied" in the sense that the Working Group responded by making the changes/corrections requested by the commenters. The remaining 2 comments for which the Working Groups responses were not acknowledged were:

  • FH2 in which Frank van Harmelen and other members of the Semantic Web Group at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam complained about inappropriate use of the terms OWL (2) DL and Full. The Working Group acknowledge the problem, extensively revised several documents and added a new Overview document.
  • FH3 in which Frank van Harmelen and other members of the Semantic Web Group at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam objected to the introduction of the XML Serialisation on the grounds of extra burden on tool developers, breaking upwards compatibility (with OWL 1), and breaking "widespread semantic-web practice that triples are the exchange currency". The Working Group responded by pointing out the RDF/XML is the only syntax for which support is mandatory; several documents were revised and a new Overview document was added in order to make this more clear. The Working Group also clarified the motivation for the XML Serialisation, updating the New Features and Rationale document accordingly.


In the second Last Call round the Working Group received 19 comments, 3 of which related to rdf:text and are still under consideration. Of the remaining 16 comments, 12 were responded to by the Working Group to the acknowledged satisfaction of the commenters (modulo some additional suggested editorial changes in the case of BG1). In 3 cases, the commenter stated that they were "not happy" or "unconvinced", but would not object further:

  • In JC2, Jeremy Caroll objected to the owl:real datatype, mainly on technical grounds. The Working Group responded with technical arguments demonstrating that the concerns expressed were unfounded.
  • In JC3, Jeremy Caroll objected to the Manchester and XML serialisations. The Working Group responded by pointing out that Manchester Syntax is already in widespread use, and that the XML serialisation will improve integration with the XML tool chain, and that interoperability with RDF will be maintained by providing a GRDDL transform.
  • In JC6, Jeremy Caroll suggested an alternative RDF encoding of negative property assertions. The Working Group responded by recalling that this issue had been considered in detail and pointing out the disadvantages of the proposed change.

In one case, the comment was responded to by the Working Group, but the commenter has indicated that they are not satisfied with the answer and would object:

  • In JC1, Jeremy Carol referred to his LC1 comment, saying that "we seemed to reach a difference of opinion concerning the overall design". In particular, he referred to his suggestion to "rebrand most, if not all, of the new features of OWL2, as 'Web-SROIQ', and put them in a separate namespace, not branded as OWL so that the (vast) majority of Semantic Web users for whom these features are neither useful nor helpful, but merely confusing, can rest more easily in ignoring them". The Working Group responded by opining that, on the contrary, "using a separate namespace for some or all of the new features of OWL 2 or using a different name for OWL 2 itself would be confusing to the vast majority of Semantic Web users, even those who might not use all these new features". It was additionally pointed out that the new features are widely supported and the rationale behind their inclusion in OWL 2 is well documented in New Features and Rationale. It is perhaps worth pointing out that in his first comment Jeremy actually expressed support for several of the new features of OWL 2:
    • "We believe [Qualified Cardinality Restrictions] to be a useful addition to OWL. Several TopQuadrant customers would use this feature."
    • "[Property chain inclusion axioms] appear to be quite widely useful."
    • "Many TopQuadrant customers require [unary datatypes]. These make sense as part of the main SemanticWeb Recommendations."
    • "We are generally supportive [of profiles]"

Comments requiring responses

  • Key to columns
    • Owner: WG member who is addressing issues and/or drafting response email
    • Response: links to response email and to subsequent acknowledgment from commenter

Comments on OWL documents
Comment Date What Author Wiki Page Owner Status Response/ack Affected Documents
1 23-Apr-09 Error in grammar production (profiles) Jos de Bruijn JdB1 Boris ACK - OK RtJdB1, RtJdB1-ack Profiles (diff)
2 27-Apr-09 Comments on class expressions Umberto Straccia US1 Bijan ACK - OK RtUS1, RtUS1-ack, RtUS1-ok None
3 27-Apr-09 Implication constructor Umberto Straccia US2 Peter ACK - OK RtUS2 RtUS2-ack None
4 01-May-09 Misuse of "axiom" in Primer Marco Colombetti MC1 Bijan/Markus ACK - OK RtMC1 RtMC1-ack Primer (diff)
5 03-May-09 Typo in Syntax Nick Main NM1 Boris ACK - OK RtNM1 RtNM1-ack Syntax (diff)
6 26-Apr-09 No definition of "Class" in Overview or Primer Richard H. McCullough RHM1 RHM1-2 Sebastian/pfps ACK - OK
(minimally)
RtRHM1 RtRHM1-ack
RtRHM1-2
RtRHM1-2-ack1
RtRHM1-2-ack2
Primer (diff)
7 12-May-09 Syntactic sugar for closure axioms Simon Paradies SP1 pfps ACK - OK RtSP1, RtSP1-ack None
8 12-May-09 OWL 2 Rationale and Branding Jeremy Carroll JC1 pfps ACK - not OK RtJC1 RtJC1-ack None
9 12-May-09 remove owl:real Jeremy Carroll JC2 Bjian ACK - OK (minimally) RtJC2 RtJC2-ack None
10 12-May-09 Manchester and XML syntaxes Jeremy Carroll JC3 pfps ACK - OK (minimally) RtJC3 RtJC3 None
11 12-May-09 ontology versioning Jeremy Carroll JC4 pfps ACK - OK RtJC4 RtJC4-ack NF&R, as part of LC update (diff)
12 12-May-09 Reification vocabulary Jeremy Carroll JC5 pfps, schneid ACK - OK RtJC5 RtJC5-ack RDF Mapping (diff), QRG (diff), New Features and Rationale (diff), RDF-Based Semantics (diff), Primer (diff)
13 12-May-09 NegativePropertyAssertions in RDF Jeremy Carroll JC6 schneid, pfps ACK - OK (minimally) RtJC6 RtJC6-ack None
14 14-May-09 Property Unions Ricardo Amador RA1 pfps ACK - OK RtRA1 RtRA1-ack None
15 12-May-09 Comments on RL Profile Benjamin Grosof BG1 Ian ACK - OK (modulo editorial comments) RtBG1 RtBG1-ack Profiles (diff)
16 15-May-09 General Comments Thomas Lörtsch TL1 pfps ACK - OK RtTL1, RtTL1-ack None


Comments on rdf:text
Comment Date What Author Wiki Page Owner Status Response/ack Affected Documents
1 21-Apr-09 Various questions C. M. Sperberg-McQueen CMSM1 Boris ACK - OK RtCMSM1, RtCMSM1-ack
2 06-May-09 Various questions SPARQL WG SPARQL1 Sandro ACK - OK SPARQL1-ack RDF Mapping (diff), SS&FS (diff), RDF-Based Semantics (diff), Profiles (diff), NF&R (diff), Quick Ref (diff)
3 18-May-09 Various questions Andrew Eisenberg AE1 Boris ACK - OK RtAE1 RtAE1-ack rdf:PlainLiteral (diff)

Comments not requiring any response

Comment Date Author

First Round

Comments requiring responses

  • Key to columns
    • Owner: WG member who is addressing issues and/or drafting response email
    • Response: links to response email and to subsequent acknowledgment from commenter

Comments not requiring any response