[LC response] To Frank van Harmelen

Dear Frank,

Thank you for your comment
      <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/ 
2009Jan/0035.html>
on the OWL 2 Web Ontology Language last call drafts.

OWL 2 is a successor of OWL and not only a successor of OWL DL. You  
are right, however, in pointing out that this is not made  
sufficiently clear in some documents, and that they sometimes seem to  
suggest that this is not the case.

In order to address this problem the WG has added a Document Overview  
and has revised several of the other documents. The Document Overview  
provides a high level view of the design, making it clear that OWL 2  
refers to the language as a whole, that an OWL 2 ontology can be  
equivalently seen as an RDF graph or as an abstract structure (an  
instance of the ontology class), and that ontologies can be  
interpreted using either the RDF-Based semantics or the Direct  
semantics.

The Structural Specification and Functional-Style Syntax document was  
always intended as a specification of the features provided by OWL 2  
as a whole, but you are right in pointing out that this was not made  
sufficiently clear. The document has been revised so that these  
features are described in their most general form using examples in  
both structural and RDF graph forms. Restrictions required in OWL 2  
DL ontologies are listed in Section 3, and it is made clear that  
these only apply to OWL 2 DL ontologies. Finally, where syntactic/ 
structural restrictions are mentioned in the remainder of the  
document it is similarly made clear if they only apply to the DL case.

An audit of the remaining documents has also been carried out in  
order to ensure that they follow the same principles, and in  
particular that the unqualified use of OWL 2 is always a reference to  
the language as a whole.

We hope that these changes address your concerns.

Please acknowledge receipt of this email to <mailto:public-owl- 
comments@w3.org> (replying to this email should suffice). In your  
acknowledgment please let us know whether or not you are satisfied  
with the working group's response to your comment.

Regards,
Ian Horrocks
on behalf of the W3C OWL Working Group

Received on Thursday, 19 March 2009 12:10:16 UTC