Re: why are properties decoupled from classes

On Oct 26, 2005, at 11:20, Jon Hanna wrote:

> Look at it the other way around. If you could assume that there was  
> a foaf:interest assserted for every foaf:Person then any  
> foaf:Person without a foaf:interest asserted would be invalid,  
> hence it would be impossible to say anything about anyone without  
> giving at least one foaf:interest which you may neither know nor  
> care about. An application concerned with people's medical history  
> will not care about the same information as one concerned with  
> their professional qualifications and so on.

Yeah, in OOP you refine the data model to reflect that.

I see RDFS and friends are designed in a more decoupled way in that  
regard because the (ideal) scenario are stores and ontologies all  
over the net, where a more restricted approach would simply not work.  
That is not the whole rationale, but I start to understand that  
context as a key point underlying semantic web technologies.

> It *is* possible to say that, for example, all people have mothers

In which formalism can you express that?

-- fxn