A new edition of this book just came out. *Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist, Second Edition: Effective Modeling in RDFS and OWL* [Paperback] Dean Allemang, James Hendler http://www.amazon.com/Semantic-Web-Working-Ontologist-Second/dp/0123859654/ Starting on page 326 there is a good section on OWL subsets and Modeling Philosophy. It describes provable models (decidable) and executable models. There is a lot of good info in here, but I thought I would highlight these sentences. *"In fact, it is quite challenging to come up with a logical system that can represent anything useful that is also decidable" * also under Executable Models. *"A different motivation for modeling in the Semantic Web is to form an integrated picture of some sort of domain by federating information from multiple sources"* Individuals should really read the entire chapter and come to their own conclusions, but I think these are issues that people need to think about. To what extent can we design a system that actually is decidable? How are these models going to be used, what is their purpose, and what are some clear use cases? Here is the use case that started me down path of linked data and the semantic web. I am in location X,Y and have a specimen of family Z. What species of family Z are expected here and what are the characters that can be used to differentiate them? Give me a list of other resources that contain information about these species. Respectfully, - Pete ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Pete DeVries Department of Entomology University of Wisconsin - Madison 445 Russell Laboratories 1630 Linden Drive Madison, WI 53706 Email: pdevries@wisc.edu TaxonConcept <http://www.taxonconcept.org/> & GeoSpecies<http://about.geospecies.org/> Knowledge Bases A Semantic Web, Linked Open Data <http://linkeddata.org/> Project --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------