RE: [OWLWG-COMMENT] ISSUE-55 (owl:class)

Hi Jim!

I'm interested: In all those OWL ontologies which use 'rdfs:Class' instead
of 'owl:Class', do you remember whether these ontologies also use
'rdfs:Resource' instead of 'owl:Thing'? If these ontologies were created
mostly by people having an strong RDF(S) background, it would look natural
to me when these people use 'rdfs:Resource' to specify the set of all
individuals. And, btw., this would also be consistent with OWL-Full
semantics, because in OWL-Full the class 'owl:Thing' is identified with the
class 'rdfs:Resource' according to 

  http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-semantics/rdfs.html#5.3

  "IOT = R_I"

Regards,
Michael

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Jim Hendler [mailto:hendler@cs.rpi.edu] 
>Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2007 3:46 PM
>To: Michael Schneider
>Cc: Owl Dev; boris.motik@comlab.ox.ac.uk; 
>pfps@research.bell-labs.com; ian.horrocks@comlab.ox.ac.uk; 
>dlm@ksl.stanford.edu; hans.teijgeler@quicknet.nl; Alan Ruttenberg
>Subject: Re: [OWLWG-COMMENT] ISSUE-55 (owl:class)
>
>Mike - this is what I was responding to - while I think 
>recommending everyone use owl:class is fine, and we 
>essentially did it in OWL 1.0, the point is lots of people are 
>using rdfs:class in a lot of large ontologies - OWL tools 
>generally seem happy with this (making the change or reporting 
>something to the user), however, there isn't a great deal of 
>effort that I can see being made on the part of, for example, 
>the FOAF community, to change to owl:class, and I don't see 
>the motivation for them to do so, since they are in OWL Full 
>anyway.   I believe most rdfs users would see little 
>difference if they used OWL class, with the exception that in 
>some cases it would mean bringing in the OWL namespace, and in 
>other cases it would mean a lot of cleanup or reverse 
>engineering w/o a lot of perceived gain.   
> Your second suggestion (that OWL tools just make the fix) is 
>okay by me, and actually I think it is the status quo, but 
>doesn't really fix the problem for the user starting to create 
>a new model - there's still confusion as to which to use.  
>What I hoped in this issue was that we could find a way to 
>make owl:class owl:equivalentTo rdfs:class, but wishing for 
>that didn't make it so, and the semantics of OWL DL 1.1 seem 
>to make it impossible to go there.
> So while it's great that OWL tools could be able to handle 
>rdfs:class, although Peter and Carsten seem to disagree (which 
>I think is what you and Alan are trying to fix), I was just 
>wishing there was a way to make it all come together - the 
>rifts between OWL DL and OWL Full, and between RDFS and OWL, 
>seem to me to cause a lot of confusion in new users - I meet 
>way too many people who think they "have to" use one thing or 
>another, often for a wrong reason, and anywhere there is 
>confusion in these things it means we increase a learning 
>curve and lose some potential users
> -JH
>p.s. I should be clear I am not actually making a technical 
>point here, I'm just bemoaning a state of the world.

--
Dipl.-Inform. Michael Schneider
FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik Karlsruhe
Abtl. Information Process Engineering (IPE)
Tel  : +49-721-9654-726
Fax  : +49-721-9654-727
Email: Michael.Schneider@fzi.de
Web  : http://www.fzi.de/ipe/eng/mitarbeiter.php?id=555

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Received on Tuesday, 11 December 2007 17:14:50 UTC