??Formal Specification?? of the OWL Web Ontology Language, 2002-07-06 by Patel-Schneider, Horrocks and van Harmelen, copyright Lucent et al. What? Despite what this says in this doc WebOnt is meant to be royalty free. See Lucent's RAND patent terms with respect to DAML+OIL
More RDF FUD from the usual suspect. Some quotes
It also attempts to describe a useful language that provides more than RDF Schema with the goal of adding functionality that is important in order to support web applications.
That would be in your opinion, and for web ontology applications
This document takes stances on several other points that are not official working group issues.
- The document assumes that the vocabulary of RDF and RDFS is not used directly in OWL knowledge bases.
So you are not layering on RDF(S). Right.
This abstract syntax does not have to worry about any of the problems induced by the RDF triple model, including non-closed and ill-formed lists and restrictions. No parsetype extensions are needed for readability, and issues of coordination with the RDF Core WG are not active at this level of syntax. Layering issues can also be safely ignored. Further, namespace issues can also be somewhat ignored; in the abstract syntax reserved words are not given with any namespace qualification.
Spot the problems. Closed lists are in RDF. No definition of ill-formed, doesn't mean anything for RDF. Wants to ignore syntax and then mentions particular bits of RDF/XML. Ignoring layering - yeah well, that's true, it is. Namespaces in abstract syntax - gah!
Seems to be using rdfs:Class. Now I'm confused. Didn't I read in some minutes that WebONT were going to define their own?