LC Responses/JR2

To: Jonathan Rees <Jonathan Rees>
CC: public-owl-comments@w3.org
Subject: [LC response] To Jonathan Rees

Dear Jonathan,

Thank you for your comment
     <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/2009Jan/0040.html>
on the OWL 2 Web Ontology Language last call drafts.

We indeed wanted to say that entities are one of the three syntactic categories, and not IRIs. To understand why this is so, consider, for example, the ObjectHasValue class expression defined in Section 8.2.3 and the accompanying UML diagram shown in Figure 8. The UML association "individual" of the UML class "ObjectHasValue" does not point to the UML class "IRI"; instead, it points to the UML class "Individual". As shown in Figure 2, the UML class "Individual" is a UML subclass of the UML class "Entity". Finally, note that the UML class "Entity" in Figure 2 has the UML association "entityIRI" to the UML class "IRI". Thus, the Syntax document defines OWL 2 ontologies as consisting of "entities identified by IRIs", rather than "IRIs that identify entities". This view is reflected in the document's introduction, as well as all the other documents.

We agree with your comment about "can be thought of as primitive terms", and have changed the text slightly.

Please note that we did not want to concern the Syntax document with the model theory at all: the Syntax document deals only with the syntactic aspect of OWL 2. The word "model" was never meant to be understood in the model-theoretic sense in the introduction; rather, it was meant to be understood in the informal sense as "represent(atation)". In order to prevent misunderstandings, we have replaced all the occurrences in the document of the former with with the latter one.

We have also replaced "formal conceptualization" with "formal specification". We would prefer not to use "conceptual model" because it contains the word "model", which seems to be susceptible to misinterpretation.

The following URI can be used to inspect the changes introduced in the Syntax document in order to address your comments:

http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/index.php?title=Syntax&diff=19729&oldid=19723

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Regards,
Boris Motik
on behalf of the W3C OWL Working Group

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Thank you again for your useful comments!