Re: ISSUE-67 (reification): REPORTED: use of reification in mapping rules is unwise

Boris Motik wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I don't want to get into an argument here whether this is really needed or not; however, I wanted to point out that I spoke to quite
> a few people asking for the annotation of axioms.
> 

There are always trade offs. I certainly am not trying to suggest that 
the feature was unmotivated. But *need* is quite a strong word.

In the wider scheme of things, the Web and Semantic Web are not 
*needed*, (not in the way that we need bread and water; love and 
friends) so I am pretty sure that any feature of OWL 1.1 is not 
necessary either.


> There is yet another solution: we might have axiom annotations in the structural specification, but then disallow (or simply delete
> them) when the ontology is exported into OWL RDF.

Interesting.

A key raison d'être for the previous WG was to have a single web 
ontology language, OWL, that encompassed the DL view and the RDF view. 
To get such interoperability was, in the view of that WG, a very 
valuable goal.

It is always possible for us to give up on that goal, and then perhaps 
the key task of this WG is merely to squabble over names (i.e. what is 
OWL?, is it the DL version, or the RDF version?)

More constructively, what I am hearing, I think, is that the requirement 
is for comments that have no semantics and just fit into the 
specification in the right way.

In RDF/XML there has always been the capability to have such comments - 
they look like:

<!--
  This is a comment, it has no bearing on the formal semantics of the 
document.
-->

It may be possible to provide say, an informative GRDDL transform from 
an XML version of the axioms, to RDF/XML, and back again, that round 
trips comments appropriately.

Jeremy

Received on Wednesday, 21 November 2007 11:59:36 UTC