1.1 alternative
Perhaps Bijan and I would be better off doing this on a mailing list - but blog to blog is sort of fun (and the Owl 1.1 list has not yet migrated to a public list - I’ll be happy to move this to public-owl-dev@w3.org once people are looking there). Basically, Bijan points to two things
1 - that there is work in the 1.1 space on identifying a number of polynomial subsets of OWL
2 - that OWL 1.1 move to an alternate syntax is okay since there is a mapping to RDF graphs
My response to point 1 is that although there have been a number of polynomial subsets identified, there seems to be little concern for user issues, as opposed to theoretical, in any of the documents Bijan cites. In addition, the charter that was floating around didn’t mention this effort as part of 1.1 deliverables. If I felt the 1.1 community was serious about a lightweight subset, I’d certainly be happy to work with them - any follow up OWL group would be a good place to move a note on this stuff to some WG status
My response to point 2 is that I am still not convinced - I think the fact that there is a mappng is good, and helps (sort of like using N3 for rules) but I’m still concerned about the integration of OWL and RDF and particularly using OWL to reason over large A boxes. That still seems not to be the driver for much of the OWL 1.1 stuff I’ve seen, as most of it still seems to be driving for more expressivity. That said, there certainly is research going on in this space, and if I could be convinced that a document written in the normative OWL/RDF format could be two way translated to the new format (even if it needs to go through an RDF graph on the way) I might be convinced — however, as two things I find really important to the use cases I’ve seen are the use of RDF documents as an exchange format for OWL and the ease of defining both RDF data and OWL classes on the same document - I’m yet to be won over. I see several disadvantages and little or no advantage to the move.
-JH
p.s. Bijan, when the Manchester format is smoothly integrated into SWOOP or similar, and I can go back and forth in my editing between RDF and the new notation, I’ll be willing to consider it 
