Re: OWL WG LC comment for SKOS reference document [ISSUE-156]

Dear Peter

Thank you for your comments [1,2,ISSUE-156]:

One portion of SKOS (Notations) uses custom datatypes.  Although these
seem to be benign, because RDF and OWL allow extra datatypes, the use of
these datatypes is not likely to be supported by many tools.  The
presence of extra datatypes is likely to cause difficulties in some
tools, which may just reject SKOS documents that have these datatypes.

 From Peter Patel-Schneider [2]:

The OWL WG notes that one portion of SKOS (Notations) uses custom
datatypes.  Although these seem to be benign, because RDF and OWL allow
extra datatypes, the use of these datatypes is not likely to be
supported by many tools.  The presence of extra datatypes may cause
difficulties in some tools, which may just reject SKOS documents that
have these datatypes.


-------------------------------------------------------------

With respect to your comment regarding extra datatypes, the OWL  
Ontology reference document [3] states:

[[
Tools may vary in terms of support for datatype reasoning. As a  
minimum, tools must support datatype reasoning for the XML Schema  
datatypes xsd:string and xsd:integer. OWL Full tools must also  
support rdf:XMLLiteral. For unsupported datatypes, lexically  
identical literals should be considered equal, whereas lexically  
different literals would not be known to be either equal or unequal.  
Unrecognized datatypes should be treated in the same way as  
unsupported datatypes.
]]

Thus we would not expect applications to *reject* SKOS documents  
containing unsupported datatypes. The Working Group propose to make  
no change to the document in response to this comment and close this  
issue.

We hope that you are able to live with this.

Cheers,

	Sean Bechhofer
	Alistair Miles

[ISSUE-156] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/track/issues/156
[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/2008Oct/0018.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/2008Oct/0059.html
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/#DatatypeSupport
--
Sean Bechhofer
School of Computer Science
University of Manchester
sean.bechhofer@manchester.ac.uk
http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/people/bechhofer

Received on Wednesday, 22 October 2008 11:57:28 UTC