- From: Jim McCusker <james.mccusker@yale.edu>
- Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2011 11:45:44 -0400
- To: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
- Cc: Antoine Isaac <aisaac@few.vu.nl>, public-esw-thes@w3.org
On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 10:34 AM, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> wrote: > IMHO foaf:focus works well for specific named entities; it works less > well for classes, and I have been wondering how best to address this. > > The difference is in the pragmatics of whether we say that foaf:focus > is a functional property. If the SKOS concept under consideration is I agree. I couldn't find anything that asserted that foaf:focus is a functional property, but then FOAF is RDFS. > #fido_the_dog, then its foaf:focus would be Fido, a Dog. And if there > were two or three URIs around (dbpedia, freebase, VIAF, ...) for that > self-same entity, they're all owl:sameAs each other. If the SKOS > concept were #dogs, ... we could still use foaf:focus to point to > (various different) classes corresponding to the class of things that > are dogs. But having an implied sameAs amongst them all is likely to > be less useful, less accurate, and more contentious. Since it is > tempting to declare foaf:focus functional, this would likely mean > nudging out the class use case to a companion property, eg. > focusClass. Or maybe there's an OWL2 idiom that can accomodate having > it both ways... The functionality of foaf:focus would not affect the actual class, just the pun of the class. So if there were two classes that were represented by the same concept, the puns would be declared sameAs. This could affect any other metamodeling, but not the OWL classes themselves. On the other hand, cmo:represents is not functional, and would therefore play nicer with existing metamodels. It also leaves room for self-representation (x cmo:represents x, which implies that x is a purely conceptual thing), which, if foaf:focus were defined as functional, then if it were found that there is a real thing (class, property, or instance) that is also represented by that thing, the concept and the thing would be identified as sameAs. Jim -- Jim McCusker Programmer Analyst Krauthammer Lab, Pathology Informatics Yale School of Medicine james.mccusker@yale.edu | (203) 785-6330 http://krauthammerlab.med.yale.edu PhD Student Tetherless World Constellation Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute mccusj@cs.rpi.edu http://tw.rpi.edu
Received on Monday, 18 April 2011 15:46:32 UTC