Re: Datatypes with no (cool) URI

Phil,

Reading Leigh's mail and his reference to the XML Schema datatypes and RDF document: I wonder whether a possible way forward would not be to define your own datatypes as derived datatypes from good-old xsd datatypes, but using the OWL 2 facilities:

http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-syntax/#Data_Ranges

My understanding is that you would need datatypes with a very restricted set of possible values; these can be described using these OWL 2 features. The advantage is that you can then mint the URI-s you want for those and, with a bit of luck, some OWL environment can handle them (which is probably not the case if you use those ISO datatypes in RDF, for example). Of course, as Leigh said, you can also define those datatypes in XML Schema, but I would not expect OWL reasoners to handle those.

B.t.w., by OWL reasoner I do not necessarily mean something very complex. My overly simple (and inefficient:-) OWL RL environment:

http://www.ivan-herman.net/Misc/2008/owlrl/

also handle some of the simpler cases...

Just an idea

Ivan

On Apr 4, 2012, at 10:30 , Leigh Dodds wrote:

> (apologies if this is a re-post, I don't think it made it through y'day)
> 
> Hi
> 
> On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 6:29 PM, Dave Reynolds <dave.e.reynolds@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 03/04/12 16:38, Sarven Capadisli wrote:
>>> 
>>> On 12-04-03 02:33 PM, Phil Archer wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> I'm hoping for a bit of advice and rather than talk in the usual generic
>>>> terms I'll use the actual example I'm working on.
>>>> 
>>>> I want to define the best way to record a person's sex (this is related
>>>> to the W3C GLD WG's forthcoming spec on describing a Person [1]). To
>>>> encourage interoperability, we want people to use a controlled
>>>> vocabulary and there are several that cover this topic.
> ...
>>> 
>>> Perhaps I'm looking at your problem the wrong way, but have you looked
>>> at the SDMX Concepts:
>>> 
>>> http://purl.org/linked-data/sdmx/2009/code#sex
>>> 
>>> -Sarven
>>> 
>> 
>> I was going to suggest that :)
> 
> +1. A custom datatype doesn't seem correct in this case. Treating
> gender as a category/classification captures both the essence that
> there's more than one category & that people may differ in how they
> would assign classifications.
> 
> I wrote a bit about Custom Datatypes here:
> 
> http://patterns.dataincubator.org/book/custom-datatype.html
> 
> This use case aside, there ought to be more information to guide
> people towards how to do this correctly.
> 
> See also:
> 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-xsch-datatypes/
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> L.
> 


----
Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
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