OWL: Yet to Arrive on the Web of Data? by Angela Guess.
From the post:
A new paper is currently available for download entitled OWL: Yet to arrive on the Web of Data? The paper was written by Birte Glimm, Aidan Hogan, Markus Krötzsch, and Axel Polleres. The abstract states, “Seven years on from OWL becoming a W3C recommendation, and two years on from the more recent OWL 2 W3C recommendation, OWL has still experienced only patchy uptake on the Web. Although certain OWL features (like owl:sameAs) are very popular, other features of OWL are largely neglected by publishers in the Linked Data world.”
It continues, “This may suggest that despite the promise of easy implementations and the proposal of tractable profiles suggested in OWL’s second version, there is still no “right” standard fragment for the Linked Data community. In this paper, we (1) analyse uptake of OWL on the Web of Data, (2) gain insights into the OWL fragment that is actually used/usable on the Web, where we arrive at the conclusion that this fragment is likely to be a simplified profile based on OWL RL, (3) propose and discuss such a new fragment, which we call OWL LD (for Linked Data).”
Interesting and perhaps valuable data about the use of RDFS/OWL primitives on the Web.
I find it curious that the authors don’t survey users about what OWL capabilities they would find compelling. It could be that users are interested in and willing to support some subset of OWL that hasn’t been considered by the authors or others.
Might not be the Semantic Web as the authors envision it, but without broad user support, the author’s Semantic Web will never come to pass.