Fwd: Use of owl:versionInfo to record ontology version IRI in RDF

Dear OWL,

Matthew Horridge found an 'unwanted feature' in the current spec when  
implementing it in the OWL API [1], see message below. This was  
discussed with Boris, who suggested:

"I see that http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/#versionInfo-def says that  
the value
should be a string. I guess this wouldn't be that difficult to change:  
we could
have something like owl:versionURI in OWL 2. "

I guess we should do this sooner rather than later?

Cheers, Uli

[1] http://owlapi.sourceforge.net/

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Matthew Horridge <matthew.horridge@cs.man.ac.uk>
> Date: 1 April 2009 13:48:37 BST
> To: Uli Sattler <sattler@cs.man.ac.uk>
> Subject: Use of owl:versionInfo to record ontology version IRI in RDF
>
> Hi,
>
> I realised that the OWL API wasn't translating an ontology's version  
> IRI into RDF, and I was about to fix this.  However, I saw that the  
> current mapping uses owl:versionInfo from OWL 1 to encode this.  I  
> just wondered whether or not another property was considered.  The  
> reason is that the OWL 1 spec states that the value of the  
> versionInfo property is a string.  Because of this, it might not be  
> possible to parse the versionInfo property of an existing ontology  
> into an IRI.  There might also be several versionInfo annotations on  
> an ontology, and in this case it's not clear which one to choose.
>
> As an example of an ontology that would be difficult to parse  
> correctly, consider the pizza ontology at
>
> http://www.co-ode.org/ontologies/pizza/2007/02/12/pizza.owl
>
> Rightly or wrongly, this ontology has three versionInfo annotations  
> and all of them are general comments about what went into successive  
> versions of the ontology.  I've seen other ontologies like this as  
> well.
>
> Would it be possible (if it's not too late, wouldn't cause too much  
> trouble etc.) to coin a new piece of vocab to store the version URI  
> of an ontology?  Something like  ontologyVersion?  Also, would it be  
> possible to specify what to do when there are multiple version IRIs?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Matthew
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 7.4.1 owl:versionInfo
> An owl:versionInfo statement generally has as its object a string  
> giving information about this version, for example RCS/CVS keywords.  
> This statement does not contribute to the logical meaning of the  
> ontology other than that given by the RDF(S) model theory.
>
> Although this property is typically used to make statements about  
> ontologies, it may be applied to any OWL construct. For example, one  
> could attach a owl:versionInfo statement to an OWL class.
>
> NOTE: owl:versionInfo is an instance of owl:AnnotationProperty.