OWLED 2007 is nigh
by Bijan Parsia
Goodness me…it really wasn’t that long ago that I wrote “OWLED 2006 is nigh“. Sigh. Things are always nigh!
This time we’re bigger than ever. We had more submissions (in the 40s over in the 30s) and we have far more registrants (90! 90 people have registered!) than last year. The schedule is quite full, but interesting. I don’t recognize loads of people which is either the good thing that we’ll have lots of new faces or the bad thing that sleep deprivation has finally destroyed my brain. Time will tell…someone.
One of the highest profile and, let’s face it, important parts of an OWLED is the “standardization” bits. In the first OWLED, we agreed on a set of features that became OWL 1.1. At the second, we agreed to submit OWL 1.1 to the W3C and pursue a working group. This OWLED we’ll agree to….whatever we’ll agree to. It’s pretty open.
When we started OWLED, I, at least, wanted some institution that would ensure that there was some hope that the work I and so many others were doing would have a sane route to adoption. I also wanted a good way to deal with the “easy” stuff that we all knew how to do, had heard people clamor for a million times, and perhaps had already done in idiosyncratic ways (e.g., QCRs, user defined datatypes, etc.). Even before a working group started, I think OWL 1.1 has helped matters. You now can use QCRs and expect all the tools to support your syntax. A small, but important, step.
While a lot of stakeholders are clearly coming out to OWLED 2007, many are not, and we only have two days. I’m hoping I can gather some feedback on needs, thoughts, and desires for OWL in advance. I divide possible enhancements into four categories:
- OWL 1.1 issues (these should go to the issues list); these are mostly for the working group
- OWL “1.2” issues; these are small, easy things that would be widely useful but didn’t get into OWL 1.1; inverse functional datatype properties are a good example; richer annotations are another
- OWL 2.0 stuff; radical but still important!; n-ary predicates, non-monotonic features; fuzzy or probabilistic features; macros; things which we may not know exactly how to do or we might not know what we should do
- OWL-adjuncts; query languages, rules and the like; language features that plug into or layer on top of owl, and typically have a distinct working group
(I omitted APIs, protocols, and surface syntaxes. These are important too, but sorta separate.)
I, personally, will be pushing for SPARQL/OWL (with mixed TBox/ABox queries) and DL-Safe rules (both under number 4). I think we could write specs for these and have implementations in fairly short order, and I think these would be enormously useful to the community. SPARQL/OWL, at least the core that I’m thinking of, is definitely a “OWL 1.2 adjunct”: easy, mostly implemented, users all over; let’s write that spec!
So that’s my brief. What’s yours? Please please please either add a comment to this post, send an email to public-owl-dev, or drop me a private note (preferably with a subject tag [OWL1.2], [OWL2.0], etc.) describing your feature, topic, or use case. I will try to filter through it all and present some sort of coherent…thing…to guide discussion.
You don’t have to be at OWLED to make a suggestion! If you aren’t there, I can’t promise that it will be as well championed as it would be if you were there, but I shall do my best.
Most of the work must, of necessity, take place after OWLED (or between OWLEDs), but there is an enormous amount of energy that comes from sitting in a room with a bunch of enthusiasts and making a joint decision.