[tmcl-wg] Consistency of TMCL Schemas ?

[Bernard Vatant]

Lars Marius

> * Bernard Vatant
> |
> | Bottom line : I tend to try and integrate and make interoperable
> | (imperfect) tools available, known and used today, than waiting for
> | the perfect tools of tomorrow (or the day after).
>
> I'm having a hard time working out what it is you are trying to say,
> or, to put it a different way, why you posted about this. What is it
> you are trying to tell us? Don't bother to create TMCL when we already
> have OWL?

The way you put it is an extreme conclusion to which I'm not yet arrived,
but don't push me too hard. For now, I meant simply that OWL can express a
lot of things TMCL is intended to do, and I am not and will certainly not
be the only one to explore that path, and use it that way. What I wonder is
what will happen when TMCL is here. People will certainly want to find at
least features found in OWL, and that's why I was pointing at internal
consistency of TM schemas, among other needed features.

And another concern is that it seems to me that TMCL is aiming at a high
level of expressivity requirements, maybe against usability. And yes, I
have a concern about the pace of TMCL development, and the high level of
requiremnts will not help. I know what the reasons are, but I am really
afraid that if TMCL comes too late on the scene and is too complex, it will
have hard time to be adopted. Have you any idea of when it will happen?
What should developers do meanwhile?

> Or something else entirely? Sorry if I'm being dense, but I
> really don't get the underlying message here.

I know you don't. I'm afraid we have been speaking passed each other
whenever it comes to OWL for almost one year now. I'm sorry about it. So I
will repeat clearly the underlying message once for all, hoping you catch
it.

1. OWL is here to stay and a lot of people agree it's a very good
specification, and it has a steep curve of adoption.

2. OWL is *not* another RDFS vocabulary. It's an ontology language that
happens to use the RDF syntax and data model. The main interest of it is
the expressivity of its abstract model, not the RDF representation (which
is maybe more of a drawback than anything else.)

3. OWL is candidate tool for interoperability of a large variety of
Knowledge Organization Systems. People work currently on migration in OWL
of a huge legacy of taxonomies, thesaurus as well as formal ontologies ...
with this global objective of semantic interoperability which, remind you,
is the original aim of topic maps. So, keeping the topic maps family of
standards on its own track without taking this context into account seems
to me a deep error.

> (Dmitry has pretty much said what I wanted to say, so I won't repeat
> his replies, except for one thing. See below.)
>
> | So far, I've been quite happy with OWL expressivity for constraining
> | topic maps.
>
> What do you mean by "topic maps" in this case? RDF?

I suppose I have to take this remark as being deliberately provocative, and
I won't answer to it. There is one thing I will agree with you anyway. I
wonder why I posted here, and will refrain to do it any more.

Bernard


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