[Sigia-l] OWL - Whoo, hoo!

[Adrian Howard]

On Saturday, August 23, 2003, at 05:22  am, Listera wrote:

> So who gets excited by this?
>
> <http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/08/20/deviant.html>

I wouldn't go as far as excited. Interested maybe :-)

I played around with OWL DL earlier this year - using it to replace 
DAML in a home-brew project. Worked very nicely.

However, I've yet to come across a use-case in the real world for which 
OWL would be a better fit than a simpler system. In my opinion the 
baggage of implementing OWL or even OWL Lite is overkill for many 
projects.

I'm not saying that use cases don't exist (FOAF is a nice example) - 
just that I've not come across one with any of my clients yet. As soon 
as the interoperability and distribution of ontologies becomes an an 
issue OWL looks like a winner.

It's a nasty catch-22. Until other people start publishing OWL 
documents then you don't gain much advantage in exporting OWL yourself. 
And, of course, if everybody takes that stance no documents will get 
published. Things like FOAF might start breaking that down.

It's also going to be interesting to see how it impacts with data 
protection issues. If OWL becomes popular then data aggregation becomes 
*trivial*, which many people find objectionable.

They're also the fact that as soon as something like OWL becomes 
popular we will get the equivalent of search engine keyword-stuffers 
trying to subvert the system in their own favour.

There's an even briefer summary of the OWL candidate recommendation at 
<http://siliconvalley.internet.com/news/article.php/3065781> for those 
who are interested.

Cheers,

Adrian (off to play with his post-it's and crayons :-)