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RE: [Fwd: Potential Gap (WAS Re: [owl-s] communication between

• To: "'Thomas B. Passin'" <tpassin@c...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: [Fwd: Potential Gap (WAS Re: [owl-s] communication between web services)]
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <len.bullard@i...>
• Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 10:44:39 -0500

1.  If I am exposing a limited set of queries, I control the 
mapping so 1 isn't hard.  In other words, it is unlikely I 
would expose an entire database to ad hoc querying.  People 
who ask for that don't understand the can of worms they are 
opening.

2.  OWL is relatively academic.  In other words, in a commercial 
setting where I rely on a development framework, I am unlikely 
to build core technology if I can get the job done with the 
framework.  For this case, OWL isn't buying me anything that I 
can't do with technology that I already have.  This isn't to 
put down OWL but to note where it is in the adoption lifecycle 
vis a vis commercial development frameworks from major players.

If we were in the data aggregation business in which one has 
to construct a warehouse from multiple data base sources that 
one doesn't control, the case for schema mapping is better 
but unless the numbers of these are high, I am usually better 
off enabling a human analyst/developer to do that work based 
on human negotiation and an interchange schema, eg, GJXDM.

len


From: Thomas B. Passin [mailto:tpassin@c...]

Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> It is completely possible to expose the schema or to expose 
> an interface schema that middleware then transforms into 
> the local schema.  As you say, Thomas, mappings.  BTW, why would I 
> need OWL to implement what is essentially a business object?

If you are interested in describing your schema - which could well be 
the schema of special views or reports that you provide - you need to 
use some language.  Mappings can be constructed when two kinds of 
information are known -

1) Identity - which primary key of one entity is equivalent to which key 
of another;
2) The semantics of terms and their relationships.

1) is hard, and has no general solution, but only specific ones.  For 2) 
why not use some standard language, and if you do that, why not use OWL? 
  OWL would not be "implementing" anything, but would contain needed 
data for the actual implementer.

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