[wg11-owl] Goal of the review

[ewallace at cme.nist.gov]

>To be careful, there were in 1992-3 half a dozen academic and 
>...

If we are being careful, why don't we avoid largely irrelevant and 
inflammatory characterizations altogether and focus on the points
that we agree are salient to the question at hand?:  
  What are the features and capabilities of OWL and its tools
  (if any) that support the needs of SC4 that EXPRESS and 
  current EXPRESS tools do not?

This question implicitly leaves "buzzword compliance" out of the
evaluation criteria.  

I can elaborate further on the features, capabilities, or weaknesses
of OWL, but I don't see much point until these can be focused on a more 
fleshed out statement of SC4 community needs.  In particular, David P.
needs to greatly expand on what he means by "implementation" in order
to evaluate the technology delta with respect to this aspect.  Even
so, I would expect the motivating language requirement for OWL to be 
some kind of semantic modeling.

This brings us back to the end of Ed's recent email:
>The problem proposed by David Leal is:  Given an APxxx or PLIB "product 
>model" rendered into OWL, and a set of product instances documented 
>according to that model, and a set of requirements for a part, to 
>determine whether any "product" in the information base meets those 
>requirements.  So: to what extent can OWL be used to capture models and 
>requirements for form, fit, function?  Can some OWL reasoners find 
>matches from models of form, fit and function of individual parts 
>(involving values for classifications and measurements and features)? 
>Can they do that somehow better than SQL queries (tests for equal, tests 
>for values within range, tests for values in sets)?  That is the kind of 
>thing I would have expected.

This seems a reasonable question, but I wonder how much of a research
project would be required to answer it?  Lalit Patil and others have done
some recent work investigating the use of Description Logics to characterize
product models.  Have others done similar work for Datalog?  If so, we would
at least have a starting point for looking into this.

-Evan

-Evan