Re: Proposed tweaks to Annotations

Hi Bijan,

I take your point on the practical usage of range/domain, thanks. If I
understand it well, at least this use case does not really care about
the possible OWL inferences, because separate tools would look at and
handle annotations anyway.

Coming back to the original discussion, Boris showed in

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-wg/2008Oct/0016.html

that the simple approach (adding, SubAnnotationPropertyOf,
AnnotationPropertyDomain and AnnotationPropertyRange into the func. spec
with an obvious mapping to the existing RDF vocabulary) might lead to a
semantic divergence between OWL DL and OWL Full. What your use case
suggests, though, that users might not really care too much, because
they would not consider the OWL reasoning on these anyway... Ie, we can
just live with that.

At least I understand the issue a bit more:-)

Thanks

Ivan

Bijan Parsia wrote:
> On 6 Oct 2008, at 16:38, Ivan Herman wrote:
> 
>> Hi Boris,
>>
>> as far as I know, the intention of using range/domain as a constraint
>> instead of a
>> license to infer typing on the subject or the object is a common
>> mistake people make
>> when starting to use OWL.
> 
> In general, sure. But people like Alan Rector want to use them specially
> on annotation properties with the intent that tools *other than
> reasoners* will take these as hints. If we syntactically forbid them,
> these folks tend to get quite upset.
> 
>> If that is the general usage for annotations, then this is
>> simply an erronous usage from OWL point of view;
> 
> I don't think it's *erronous*. Alan, for example, isn't expecting a
> *reasoner* to give him an inconsistency or to infer anything (though he
> has no problem if it does). There are *lots* of heurstics that knowledge
> *acquisition* tools use by analyzing the asserted structure of the
> ontology. (This often goes under the heading of "sanctioning".)
> 
> Now, I may, personally, not be so happy with this way of doing
> something, but in the absence of a good alternative I don't see that
> this particularly way of handling things is *harmful*.
> 
>> ie, I am not sure this is a good enough
>> argument to specially deal with it...
> 
> It seems a good enough reason for me.
> 
>> I may have misunderstood you, though.
>>
>> (As an aside: don't take me wrong, trying to define constraints like
>> that on the usage
>> of a predicate is a legitimate user request and I have met this
>> several time when
>> talking to people. It is just that OWL does not look like the right
>> tool for that...)
> 
> It provides *some* constraint, e.g., you can't include a disjoint
> element. The alternatives aren't OWL constraint and constraint
> constraint, it's *no* constraint (because you can't say *anything* about
> the annotation properties) and some constraint (at least OWL
> constraints, and with tooling, a bit more).
> 
> Cheers,
> Bijan.
> 

-- 

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
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