Talk:Web Ontology Language

Editors in infobox out of date
Mike Dean can't possibly be an editor of OWL any more; he died in 2014

AFAIK, the OWL specification will not change in the future, since was supplanted by OWL 2. So I think it's appropriate to leave Mike and Guus as editors. Tim Finin (talk) 01:34, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

Untitled
Wasn't it also Borland's Object Window Library an alternative to VCL? --Error 00:47, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Footnote for Guus Schreiber
I found the following slide on the w3c site. I thought it could function as a footnote/reference for Guus Schreiber #10.--Dj Zoos (talk) 09:33, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

INACCESSIBLE PAGE
Your page uses at least one image instead of text. Please do not do this, it is impossible for the blind and partially-sighted to read. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.185.144.124 (talk) 08:29, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Or, rather, I'm not seeing any issue anymore. —Tom Morris (talk) 11:11, 12 July 2015 (UTC)

SHION
Does SHION(D) and SHIF(F) really need to be shown as equations? They distract the eye as you read it.. ? --RickiRich 21:41, 6 December 2005 (UTC)


 * I agree with this - I do not see any need to show those names in math mode Johann Petrak 20:46, 13 March 2007 (UTC)


 * I tend to think of the \mathcal is part of the name. The Description logic page uses it as well, and best to be consistent between them. Bparsia 18:36, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Examples please
This topic would be improved if it showed a simple "toy" example of OWL for illustrative purposes. --Erik 15:27, 5 December 2006 (UTC)Erixoltan
 * Agreed. -- Beland 04:40, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

MME edits
It's great that the OWL entry is getting attention, but I don't really agree with the changes which have been made. Maybe we need to work to craft a compromise entry.

Saying that OWL is about "sharing data using ontologies" instead of just "sharing ontologies" strikes me as misleading. The RDF subset of OWL is the language for sharing just the data elements. The term "OWL" is generally used to refer particularly to the semantic markup used to annotate such RDF data.

The terms "semantic" and "syntactic" don't mean much to me unless they are defined, and defining them is *hard*. I think the original wording about the "content of" information is preferable, although I completely agree it's not ideal.

And I strongly disagree with the changes made to the final modified paragraph. While some people do view OWL as the foundation of the semantic web, I think the majority of OWL users these days don't care a whit for the "Semantic Web" vision. To say the language is being positioned as this or that suggests that this is the predominant view or outlook, and it's not.

The description of OWL as "significantly augment[ing] the semantic content provided by XML" is very strange, since XML doesn't offer any significant semantic import to its data. I suppose you could ascribe some semantics to the various XML Schema languages, but such things are different enough from OWL that I think the comparison is just confusing. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Rvcx (talk • contribs) 20:05, 6 February 2007 (UTC).

Copy-pasted section
I noticed that section "Sublanguages" is copied from W3C OWL Overview, section 1.3. I'm not sure but doesn't this violate some copyright? --Picci 18:47, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Parsing problem
I am having trouble parsing this sentence in the first para. (and don't know enough to fix it) "This family of languages is based on two (largely, but not entirely, compatible) semantics: OWL DL and OWL Lite semantics are based on Description Logics..." Parkerdr (talk) 15:10, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

Me too! It reads horribly. When I tried to rewrite it I found I did understand it, but its awfully complex for an introductory paragraph. --Dan|(talk) 16:29, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

I've merged this into "Relation to description logics" and replaced it. Hopefully fixed now. 130.88.170.110 (talk) 17:02, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

Maximally Expressive Complete Sublanguage ??
The claim that "OWL DL was designed to provide the maximum expressiveness possible while retaining computational completeness" seems misleading to me. Surely there is no unique maximally expressive decidable sublanguage of OWL. There will be other sublanguages that are more expressive in some respects than DLs (though less expressive in others). Also, given any DL, I believe that it would be possible to add further constructs (albeit probably quite restricted ones) that increase expressive power while retaining decidability. A further point is that "computational completeness" is ambiguous. "Decidability" is the more precise term (completeness doesn't necessarily imply decidability -- though it usually implies semi-decidability). Sifonios (talk) 22:56, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

=Deficiencies=

What are (potential) deficiencies of OWL? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Wbeek (talk • contribs) 11:47, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Created new section called limitations, and summarised criticisms left in prose 130.88.170.110 (talk) 18:25, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

It is not true that n-ary relationships cannot be described with OWL. They require reification, but can be described:. It is a very misleading mistake. 64.180.111.6 (talk) 19:39, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

Original Research
In the OWL Characteristics section, the discussion of Properties includes significant editorializing and opinion. Most of this section expresses the author's personal interpretation of, and dissatisfaction with, OWL properties. Right or wrong, these should be omitted and the content refocused on neutral description of characteristics of OWL Properties. It may be appropriate to include a section on the strengths and limitations of OWL (note: "not" pros and cons), but this should be clearly separated from summary characterization of the language. Such a section also should be limited to well-established consequences of OWL's design, accompanied by citations. ajvz (talk) 05:29, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

The OWL Characteristics seems poorly organised and uses a lot of words for a small amount of substance. The sentence about arity would work better as a note in a "Limitations" section, I think. 130.88.170.110 (talk) 16:36, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

Created a new section called limitations, and summarised criticisms left in prose. These are now Modus ponens (a direct binary relation is - well - binary and direct). If anyone want to claim these are criticisms (as opposed to limitations) then please supply some citations ;-) 130.88.170.110 (talk) 18:25, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

Misleading Content
Some of the descriptions in this article are misleading. I can't tell whether the problem lies in an incomplete technical understanding or in the writing. Either way, a reader without prior knowledge would likely come away with a number of confusions. For example, wording under "History" and under "Relation to description logics" gives the impression that OWL Full is based in a Description Logic (though other sections correctly distinguish OWL Full on these grounds, they appear to be the more cut-and-paste sections, and these passages give the contrary impression). In the "Example ontologies" section, the first statement may give the impression that OWL ontologies must be edited in order to be browsed, or that only some OWL ontologies can be viewed with any given OWL tool. The content of this section is also very limited and non-representative, and is an odd fit with the OWL topic. It would make more sense to point to existing OWL libraries and repositories. The suggestion to search for ".rdf" files in order to get OWL ontologies is also misleading. ajvz (talk) 05:29, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

Reorganised and restructured the content of the "Example Ontology" section. Consisted of public ontologies so tool that as the title. Structure may be overkill. So, may need to review later.

130.88.170.110 (talk) 17:44, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I reworked the confusion first paragraph, merged into "Relation to description logics". Seems consistent to me. Not sure about the netiquette but will remove note from article. 130.88.170.110 (talk) 16:32, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

How do I know I have the right "tea" URI?
I find 47 synonyms for "tea". What happens if I'm in the Texas Education Agency & the little green leaves folks have claimed URI = tea first? DEddy (talk) 18:59, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Hyperlinking
The article has too many hyperlinks. We do not link every occurrence of a term. Typically, only the first use of a term in the article should be linked. This should be the case for general terms like World Wide Web Consortium. It should only be linked the first time it is used, in the lead. For the use of terms essential to understanding, they could be linked the first time they are introduced in a section in which they are crucial to the discussion, even if they have been linked in previous sections. In no case should a term be linked more than once in a section. Yworo (talk) 13:38, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

All the Non Primary Source Tags
I'm looking for some additional sources but I just want to say I disagree with all those tags. There are some (rare) times IMO when a primary source is simply the best reference. If I'm quoting a passage from the King James bible then I shouldn't use as a reference some other book that also quotes the same passage of the King James bible but just give the primary source. IMO in many of the cases that are tagged here (while not quite as obvious as my example) it is the same kind of justification. If the article says "Version X of software Foo incorporated the Bar standard" then it makes perfect sense to use the published official spec for Version X of Foo as the reference. I think that is the case with many of the tags here for things like Fact++. It would be different if we were trying to establish notability for Fact++ but this is about OWL not the various reasoners and toole like Protege that use OWL so referencing manuals and specs for Protege and Fact++ that say how they incorporate OWL IMO is perfectly proper and doesn't really rate a tag. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 14:43, 9 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Just a follow up: I added two books about programming the Semantic Web that talk about the various reasoners and other tools like Fact++ and aren't primary sources so I removed the tags. I left all the primary sources as well though, I think they might be very useful for someone starting to research this topic. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 15:36, 10 January 2015 (UTC)

2.2 Acronym
Is there no truth in the idea that "OWL" was chosen, in preference to "WOL", as a reverse homage to the Owl in Winnie the Pooh? He was the only character in the story who could write, but (to amuse the children reading the story?) spelled his name "WOL". — Preceding unsigned comment added by PeterParslow (talk • contribs) 17:02, 29 November 2021 (UTC)