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I am the project manager for an effort to provide web-based information integration services, and we have been wrestling with the issue of "How much semantics is enough?" for the last couple of years. While the emergence of OWL seems to provide a more expressive means to represent the semantics required to allow application discrimination of data assets existing at some resource, it is not clear yet if description logics are sufficiently robust to do so for the general case.
It is not just the representation itself that is of concern - a sophisticated application may find the need to perform inference upon the elements of a source ontology - and the stance we have taken going into our project was that until "how much is enough" is proven, we will select the most expressive ontological representation that we can find. In our case we did not choose KIF but rather an implementation of WFS. At this point in the evolution of these technologies, I would rather opt for too much expressive power in the technologies that I base my development on rather than not enough.
Tim Wilmering
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