Re: OWL Questions! (RDFS/OWL relationship)

On Wed, 2003-04-02 at 11:07, Davide Noaro wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm an italian student of computer science and I'm interesting in Web
> Ontology Language. 
> I read documents about it, but i didn't understand well how OWL works
> and the relation with RDFS.... here some questions
>  
> 1) OWL is an extension of RDFS? That is, OWL has much expressive power
> than RDFS ( i can express thing that with RDFS i coudn't ) or it's
> equal but it can express relation and properties more easily? 

The overview covers this question...

"OWL has more facilities for expressing meaning and semantics than XML,
RDF, and RDF-S, and thus OWL goes beyond these languages in its ability
to represent machine readable content on the Web."

  -- 1. Introduction
  OWL Web Ontology Language 
  Overview 
  W3C Working Draft 31 March 2003
  http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/#s1

and the reference covers it in a it more detail...


"OWL is a vocabulary extension of RDF."
  -- 1.4 OWL and RDF semantics
  OWL Web Ontology Language 
  Reference
  W3C Working Draft 31 March 2003
  http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/#Semantics

The exact nature of the relationship is covered in
excruciating detail in the semantics document,
and there are a number of relevant test cases.

But I suspect the two sections above are most responsive
to your question. Do they answer your question well enough?

 
> 2)There are some pratical example of the use and usefulness of OWL? (
> Not test cases of W3C or Wine ontology)
>    I think to a tool that can do something usefull with an
> ontology.... 

Tools are emerging. We're starting to collect tools
and implementation experience...
  http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/WebOnt/#Tools

Strictly speaking, this question isn't in scope of the specification;
you're welcome to ask in www-rdf-logic@w3.org , a forum
where many of the tool developers participate.

> I think that without some very pratical example people cound't
> understand well how ontology work and why develop them. Thanks for any
> answer... and sorry for my english! ;-)

On the contrary, thank you very much for translating your
question to English. It is W3C's policy[1] to conduct official
business in English, but we see this as a necessary evil,
not an optimal situation. We do what we can[2] to facilitate
participation in other languages.

In particular, I believe we have a certain amount of
resource available to work with OWL feedback in Italian,
right Massimo?

[1]  5.1 General Information about Technical Reports
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process-20010719/tr.html#DocumentsGeneral

[2] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Translation/

> Davide.
>  
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> Davide Noaro 
> noarodavide@libero.it
> ------------------------------------------------------------ 
-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Wednesday, 2 April 2003 14:02:24 UTC