[Sigia-l] OWL - Whoo, hoo!

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Adrian Howard
| 
| 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.

I think it helps to separate the pieces involved here: FOAF doesn't
really have anything to do with OWL. FOAF is an RDF application, and
OWL is just an advanced schema/constraint language for RDF. What makes
FOAF interesting is *not* OWL, but the fact that it uses RDF.

Personally, I think that for IA kind of things topic maps are a better
fit than RDF, which is heavily oriented towards logic, and doesn't
really give you much help with IA-type issues.
 
| It's a nasty catch-22. Until other people start publishing OWL
| documents then you don't gain much advantage in exporting OWL
| yourself. 

Well, that's not really true. OWL is carefully designed to support
logical inferencing. That's what it's for, and what it really does,
and if you want logical inferencing OWL is very useful to you, even if
you don't exchange it with anyone else. And if you *don't* want
logical inferencing there's not really all that much you can use OWL
for, except as a fancy schema language.

| 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.

Uh, no, it does *not* become trivial. Not even nearly. There are quite
a few data integration software companies selling software that has
capabilities well beyond what OWL offers, but even they won't claim
that their solutions are a panacea.
 
| 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.

For a semantic web-like vision that is definitely the case, but the
identity-based data models like RDF are not only about being able to
interchange information. They have many other useful properties that
are helpful for information management even if you don't exchange data
with others.

It's rather like XML: for the kinds of things it's suited for it is
very useful, even if you don't exchange your XML documents. Lots and
lots of people use XML all over without ever exchanging documents with
anyone.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
GSM: +47 98 21 55 50                  <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >