Reflexive properties shjould be removed from OWL RL and OWL RL/RDF

• From: Boris Motik <boris.motik@comlab.ox.ac.uk>
• Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2008 18:16:29 +0100
• To: <public-owl-wg@w3.org>
• Message-ID: <11B9E414A788486BA9D51DFD9FCEE29F@wolf>

Hello,

I've just received a request from basically all the reviewers of the Profiles document to remove the reflexive properties from both
OWL RL and OWL RL/RDF. The rationale was that this feature might cause problems for performance.

Another reason why reflexive properties might cause problems is that they are not domain-independent: if P is a reflexive property,
then <x, p, x> should hold for all domain elements x -- even those that are not mentioned explicitly in the RDF graph. This makes
the definition of the semantics via rules quite awkward because it would require referring to the entire domain. The current
solution is a hack.

I agree with this request and believe that we should remove reflexive properties from OWL RL and OWL RL/RDF. Unless someone objects
in the next day or so, I will go ahead and make the change.

Regards,

	Boris

Received on Friday, 19 September 2008 17:18:11 UTC