[LC response] To Jeremy Carroll Re: new comment: reification vocab

Dear Jeremy,

Thank you for your comment
     <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/2009May/0016.html>
on the OWL 2 Web Ontology Language last call drafts.

The Working Group is unwilling to use the RDF reification vocabulary
because of the uncertainty of the intended meaning of RDF reification
and the resulting strong negative views concerning its use.

The Working Group also feels that owl:subject, owl:predicate, and owl:object
serve a different purpose than rdf:subject, rdf:predicate, and rdf:object.
The terms are part of a new annotation framework in OWL 2, and the purpose
of the terms is to provide a technical means for annotating certain kinds
of OWL 2 axioms and other annotations in OWL 2. The usage of these terms
is intended to be restricted to annotation tasks in OWL 2, only. Note also
that the scope of an annotation in OWL 2 is an OWL 2 axiom or
OWL 2 annotation, which will often be encoded by more than one RDF triple.

Nevertheless, the Working Group acknowledges that the currently used terms
"owl:subject", "rdf:predicate", and "rdf:object" can easily be confused with
the terms of the RDF reification vocabulary. The Working Group will
therefore change the names of the terms in the following way:

  owl:subject   --> owl:annotatedSource
  owl:predicate --> owl:annotatedProperty
  owl:object    --> owl:annotatedTarget

The Working Group believes that this change will clarify the intended
restricted usage of the terms and will also help to avoid confusion with
the RDF reification vocabulary.

The Working Group considers this renaming of the terms to be a means
to improve the clarity of the specification, and does not consider it
as a change to the current design of OWL 2.

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you are satisfied with the working group's response to your comment.

Regards,
Peter F. Patel-Schneider and Michael Schneider
on behalf of the W3C OWL Working Group