Re: ISSUE-94 (n-ary constucts and RDF): Problem with roundtripping when going from functional-style syntax into RDF and back

From: "Boris Motik" <boris.motik@comlab.ox.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: ISSUE-94 (n-ary constucts and RDF): Problem with roundtripping when going from functional-style syntax into RDF and back
Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:16:43 -0000

> Hello,
> 
> At the telecon on the 23rd of January 2008, some people suggested that
> this issue should be discussed in a broader context of the
> question whether roundtripping is a requirement.
> 
> To kick off that discussion, I really do believe it is. RDF/XML is the
> main syntax for OWL, and it is really strange to make it
> incomplete w.r.t. the functional-style syntax and the structural
> specification. 

RDF/XML cannot be complete w.r.t the functional-style syntax and the
structural specification.  It wasn't complete for OWL 1.0 DL, even with
separated vocabularies.

The way to reduce this problem is to make another syntax be the main WWW
serialization syntax for OWL.  The new OWL XML syntax should do fine for
this purpose (although I haven't checked to see whether it is complete
so a bit of change might be needed).  

As a decided bonus round-tripping through the OWL XML syntax is much
easier than round-tripping through RDF/XML!

peter


> Here is why I believe this is important (copied from
> my original e-mail):

> > Ontology editors such as Protégé typically allow for n-ary
> constructs. Hence, it is likely that a
> > user might enter an axiom such as (1) and save the ontology; after
> restarting the editor and
> > loading the saved ontology, the user might be surprised that he gets
> new axioms. In fact, the new
> > binary presentation might be quite inconvenient for users: they might
> have used an n-ary construct
> > in order to have fewer axioms in the list of axioms that they work
> with.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> 	Boris

Received on Wednesday, 23 January 2008 19:33:58 UTC