i18n core comments on "Time Ontology in OWL" Working Draft

Hi Felix,

Thank you for your comments on the time ontology note.
Please see our 
reply below.

> - General: The i18n core WG has published a Working
Group note on
> "Working with Time Zones", see
> htt
p://www.w3.org/TR/2005/NOTE-timezone-20051013/ . It
would be great if
> you could consider adopting the following terminology,
which is
> described in that note:
> * time zone: an identifier for a specific location or
region which
> translates into a combination of rules for calculating
the UTC offset.
> * zone offset: the difference in hours and minutes
between a particular
> time zone and UTC
> * ID for a time zone: necessary for a time zone
sensitive calendar system.
> Although you use both the terms "time zone"
and "zone offset", we think
> that a section with clear definitions would be
beneficial.

We can refer to your working group note in the time ontology
note to share 
the terminology.

> - The translation of durations between various country
/ region specific
> calendars might become difficult with your design of
durations. An
> example: translating a 1 month duration into another
calendar, for
> example, gets hard, since "1 month" is not a
fixed number of days in
> either the source or target calendar.

It's the convention of people's everyday life to use
"month" as a unit, 
e.g., "2 months and 3 days". Although "1
month" has no
fixed number of days in general, it can be fixed when
anchored on the time 
line, e.g., "1 month" of March in 2006 has 31
days.

> - The "Olson time zone database" is a common
source for time zone IDs.
> See http://www.twin
sun.com/tz/tz-link.htm for more information. It would
> be great if you could refer to that data base and
describe how your
> ontology relates to it (has it more information, less /
the same?).
> See sec. http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/NOTE-timezone-20051013/#d2e226
 .

Thanks for the reference. I think we are pretty similar in
terms of the 
coverage. The "Olson time zone database" is
probably
more committed in maintaining it, so it would be great if
their data could 
be mapped or transformed to a Semantic Web format,
e.g., in RDF or OWL.

Thanks!

Feng Pan and Jerry Hobbs

--
Feng Pan, Ph.D. Candidate
USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI)
Email: panisi.edu
Web: http://www.isi.edu/~pan/