Re: What is the rationale for "*:x rdf:type owl:NamedIndividual" ?

On 11 Nov 2008, at 13:59, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 4:37 AM, Boris Motik
> <boris.motik@comlab.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> This declaration has no special meaning: owl:NamedIndividual is  
>> not assigned any special meaning in the vocabulary of OWL 2. The
>> vocabulary element is used only to denote that 8:x is declared.
>>
>> Note that writing *:x rdf:type olw:Thing would be ambiguous. You  
>> get the same triple by serializing this axiom:
>>
>> ClassAssertion( owl:Thing *:x )
>
> This is a useless axiom. Therefore I suggest that we consider it the
> declaration.

It's really not a good idea to try to overload tautologies with other  
meaning. This leads to things like the min 0 debacle. Declarations  
are declarations.

(A simple example of how this can go pear shaped, this is an  
entailment but we don't want declarations to be entailments.)

Cheers,
Bijan.