Re: [SKOS] OWL DL compatibility

Alistair Miles wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I tried to illustrate some of the issues relating to SKOS and OWL DL 
> compatibility, see:
> 
> http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/wiki/SkosDesign/OwlCompatibility?action=recall&rev=7 

On my todo list is still to write a message to 
owl-dev entitled something like "forcing a 
distinction between datatype and object properties 
leads to ontological overcommitments".  The 
findings of Alistair are a pattern I've seen now a 
number of times.  In our digital heritage projects 
we have the same problem, e.g. when specializing 
Dublin Core [1]. For Dublin-Core like properties 
one often cannot commit to a specific range, not 
even individual or literal.

The pattern we use is the following:

- specify properties with rdf:Property, indicating 
only the range in unequivocal cases
- when you know for subparts of the collection 
which ranges (e.g. vocabulary parts) you want to 
use, write local range restriction (using 
owl:Restriction) in a separate local scheme. This 
approach allows others to use the property with 
another range.

An example of this:
- the definition of VRA as a specialization of DC 
for visual resources (images) [1]
- an collection-specific annotation scheme in 
which the Getty vocabularies and WordNet are 
defined are used as local ranges [2]

By its nature this can not be OWL DL (we need 
property specialization and we need to use 
rdf:Property), although it seems pretty harmless. 
Anyway, our applications typically only do simple 
OWL reasoning (transitive, symmetry, inverse, 
sameAs), so it doesn't really matter. The other 
OWL stuff (local ranges, etc) are just needed to 
guide the annotation interface.

Guus

[1] 
http://e-culture.multimedian.nl/resources/vracore3.rdfs
[2] 
http://e-culture.multimedian.nl/resources/annotationScheme.rdfs


> 
> 
> ACTION: Alistair to rephrase the old issue of skos/owl-dl coexistence 
> and semantics [recorded in 
> http://www.w3.org/2007/01/22-swd-minutes.html#action08]
> --done
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Alistair.
> 

-- 
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Received on Wednesday, 21 February 2007 08:14:46 UTC