- From: Richard Newman <rnewman@twinql.com>
- Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2009 21:32:06 -0800
- To: Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>
- Cc: Jiri Prochazka <ojirio@gmail.com>, semantic-web@w3.org
- Message-Id: <AA8629A7-C364-44B4-B00D-2006D459B152@twinql.com>
> I find your remark very odd, and more demonstrative of a lack of > experience than an accurate perception of the state or vision of the > Semantic Web. Certainly the lack of customers using OWL becomes a > self-fulfilling prophecy when such a point of view is held. I was merely stating my experience: in my (... 6? Blimey.) years in the SW community, I'd say the ratio of organizations I've worked with using RDF for storage versus simple reasoning versus OWL reasoning is approximately 10:5:1. Granted, my recent work has been on a system that doesn't currently offer OWL reasoning (partly because of a lack of demand from customers: RDFS++ has been adequate), but we do stay in touch with a wide variety of people, including the RACER folks. That's not to say that OWL *vocabulary* isn't used; after all, why bother making up your own sameAs property? I'm simply saying that folks trying to use OWL-DL (and up) reasoners on *real datasets and systems* (as opposed to things like my occasional playing around with Pellet) are significantly outnumbered by those dumping big datasets into RDF, and tooling for large-scale RDF systems is more widely available than tooling for OWL systems on the same scale. The implication of that is that a solution in OWL 2 is not a solution for the majority of people: their tooling doesn't support it, or reasoning won't scale to their datasets, or they have to interoperate with others who aren't using it. > OWL is widely deployed in the area I work on the Semantic Web for > science, with our own Neurocommons being a 400M triple store expressed > in OWL and many other projects using OWL. Can I ask what level of reasoning you apply to Neurocommons? > It would make no sense for any of these projects to use RDF or even > RDFS. I wasn't saying anything of the sort. If you scroll back and read what I wrote, I said: * OWL 2 has annotations of assertions (yay!) * I haven't heard of a single customer who is considering using OWL 2 * I don't know of any widespread deployments of OWL (the implication being "OWL reasoning", not "OWL vocabulary", which I would hope is obvious). All of those things are true, and I'm not impugning OWL. I would very much like to know about high-scale, high-traffic services being backed by OWL reasoning; knowledge of the industry is very interesting to me. Terascale reasoning would make some of my areas of interest much more straightforward! > For one thing, the Semantic Web languages are aimed to be a set that > work together and > build on each other. OWL will offer the first specified way of doing > expressive annotations and it would make no sense to do other than use > the facilities it offers, as owl:sameAs and owl:inverseFunctional are > used now. I will certainly investigate it. The reason I said this was something of a chicken/egg situation is that I can't see customers porting their *data* to OWL 2 without having tools to push it around. A language is useless without speakers. -R
Received on Tuesday, 10 February 2009 05:32:45 UTC