Re: ShEx relation to SPIN/OWL

On 8/1/14, 6:55 AM, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
> All these complaints about RDFS and OWL appear to be based on the 
> conception that RDFS and OWL work with a single document containing 
> everything that can ever be said about a particular vocabulary.
>
> However, this is a misconception.  It is certainly possible in RDFS 
> and OWL to have multiple documents that speak to the same vocabulary. 
+1

As I tried to explain in my diagram [1], the declarations of classes, 
properties and instances can happen in one graph, and then there can be 
multiple interpretations, including specifications in multiple 
languages. OWL already has owl:imports, SPIN already has spin:imports, 
ICV has ic:imports. RDF should probably have rdf:imports (and rdf:Graph 
similar to owl:Ontology).

I guess the question remains is what to do with the published 
vocabularies that do not honor this separation and mix the OWL 
restrictions and class definitions into a single file. Even rdfs:domain 
and range statements are often too restrictive. One answer is to simply 
ignore those statements and start with the languages in the right hand 
side of the diagram. After all, an rdfs:domain statement is just another 
triple. But there will be applications where mixing Shapes or SPIN with 
OWL semantics is desirable. There is no single truth here, and the 
application developer is already allowed to choose.

Holger

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-shapes/2014Jul/0295.html

Received on Thursday, 31 July 2014 22:44:10 UTC