Re: Friendly amendment to rif:subClassOf

Michael Kifer wrote:
> Actually, semantically rdfs:subClassOf is a subrelation of rif:subClassOf.
> Not the other way around.

</chair>
I went back and forth on this.  I'm not sure it matters that much, as 
long as rif:subclass is not reflexive.   Since you haven't formally 
defined the semantics of rif:subclass yet, we could go either way.

Intuitively, it seemed to me that every rif:subclass relation is an 
rdfs:subclass relation, but there may be rdfs:subclass relations that 
a translator will not want to consider as rif:subclass (e.g. the 
reflexive cases, the cases where one of the arguments is not a class, 
the case where one of the arguments is a piece of rdf or rif syntax, 
etc).

I guess it depends on whether you want every rdfs:subclass relation 
(including the entailed ones) in rdf graphs to entail rif:subclass in 
RIF rules or whether you want a translator to do it.  I could go 
either way.

Note that rif:subclass rdfs:subproperty rdfs:subclass does not make 
rif:subclass reflexive - it does mean that for every A rif:subclass B 
we would also have A rdfs:subclass A and B rdfs:subclass B, but that's 
just what rdfs:subclass means.  Shouldn't be a problem for rif:subclass.

<chair>

> 
> 
> 	--michael  
> 
> 
>> </chair>
>> Here is a hopefully friendly amendment to the proposal to add a 
>> rif:subClassOf relation to BLD:
>>
>> If we just say that <rif:subClassOf rdfs:subPropertyOf 
>> rdfs:subClassOf> I think it goes part of the way in addressing the 
>> chief concern of Jos and Dave (which is, as I understand it, that we 
>> shouldn't add yet another subclass relation to the semantic web).
>>
>> This would make it clear that we are not really creating something 
>> new, just imposing a restriction on something already there - in 
>> particular all rif:subClassOf relations are also rdfs:subClassOf 
>> relations, but not the reverse, and we would say that rif:subClassOf 
>> is not reflexive, only holds between classes, etc.
>>
>> Less the new name, this is what Jos proposed - to define a suitably 
>> restricted subset of RDFS that would be usable for RIF.  I think the 
>> new name (rif:subClassOf) helps to make it clear that we do not intend 
>> the full rdfs semantics, rather than "hiding" that in the semantics.
>>
>> <chair>
>>
>> -Chris
>>
>> Chris Welty wrote:
>>>
>>> Michael Kifer wrote:
>>>> Rumblings on why we need classification terms in RIF
>>>> (and why RDF's vocab should not be used)
>>>> ===================================================
>>>>
>>>> Two issues: whether we should define facilities for expressing some data
>>>> model stuff and whether we should use rdfs for this.
>>>>
>>>> Rationale:
>>>>    If we do not have such constructs then everybody will be inventing 
>>>> their
>>>>    own. People will not be able to specify any part of their data 
>>>> model in RIF
>>>>    which will reduce the usefulness of RIF as an exchange language.
>>>>
>>>> Why it is not good to use RDF's facilities to define class hierarchies.:
>>>>    RDF is a foreign language whose semantics is burdened with 
>>>> non-standard
>>>>    things. For instance, subclass is reflexive.
>>>>
>>>>    This is bad because not every language out there uses reflexive 
>>>> subclasses.
>>>>    For instance, if we map, say, FLORA-2's subclass relationship to 
>>>> RDFS's then
>>>>    in the translation (RIF) the query whether foo is a subclass of foo 
>>>> will
>>>>    say "yes" but in FLORA-2 it will say "no".
>>> </chair>
>>> No, no - translating flora2:subclass into rdfs:subclass would be 
>>> incorrect, because they have different semantics.  For me, this is the 
>>> stronger point in favor of rif:subclass - since so few systems use the 
>>> rdfs semantics for subclass, very few systems when translating into RIF 
>>> would use it in their translations.
>>>
>>> Same for below.  You shouldn't translate ilog:subclass into 
>>> rdfs:subclass.  So, in fact, as far as we know, only rdfs based systems 
>>> would ever use rdfs:subclass when translating through rif, and everyone 
>>> else would have to invent their own.
>>> <chair>
>>>
>>>>    Let's look at some other examples, like ILOG. From my limited 
>>>> experience
>>>>    with it, I remember that it uses Java as its data model. So, suppose
>>>>    there is a class foo in ILOG, which comes from Java. An ILOG set of
>>>>    rules must not derive "foo sub foo" because this is not true in the 
>>>> data
>>>>    model. However, it we translate Java subclass relationship into
>>>>    rdfs:subclassOf then the resulting RIF translation should generate 
>>>> "foo
>>>>    sub foo". (In truth, as I recall, ILOG does not have "sub" in the 
>>>> heads
>>>>    of the rules, but it is easy to imagine that next year ILOG is 
>>>> extended
>>>>    with something like a query facility. Then their stock will plummet
>>>>    because their rule sets will not be faithfully exchangeable through 
>>>> RIF
>>>>    :-)
>>>
>>>
>> -- 
>> Dr. Christopher A. Welty                    IBM Watson Research Center
>> +1.914.784.7055                             19 Skyline Dr.
>> cawelty@gmail.com                           Hawthorne, NY 10532
>> http://www.research.ibm.com/people/w/welty
>>
>>
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Dr. Christopher A. Welty                    IBM Watson Research Center
+1.914.784.7055                             19 Skyline Dr.
cawelty@gmail.com                           Hawthorne, NY 10532
http://www.research.ibm.com/people/w/welty

Received on Thursday, 16 August 2007 12:54:19 UTC