owl:Thing (was Re: Managing Co-reference)

Thomas Bandholtz wrote:
> 
> suddenly so quiet here :-)
> 
> Re-reading the OWL spec I found that owl:sameAs has domain & range = 
> owl:Thing.
> So any two concepts which are not derived from owl:Thing cannot be 
> connected by owl:sameAs.


My view is that it was an error for the terms  owl:Thing and owl:Class 
to have ever been introduced. Instead I believe it would have been less 
confusing to use rdfs:Resource and rdfs:Class even in OWL DL.

In OWL Full, the two concepts owl:Thing and owl:Class are just a 
confusion; they are equivalent classes to rdfs:Resource and rdfs:Class.

In OWL DL - the syntactic restriction mean that it is impossible to 
express the fact that the concepts owl:Thing and owl:Class are narrower 
than rdfs:Resource and rdfs:Class; but stepping outside OWL DL, to a 
very human but formally non-existent meta-level, it is clear that they are.

If OWL DL had used the rdfs terms, then the difference could have been 
articulated as, well of course, owl:Nothing is an rdfs:Resource, but you 
can't say that in DL.

Jeremy