dissatisfaction with the entailment rules development

I am deeply dissatisfied with the way the various entailment rules are
specified in the RDF Semantics document (currently the version of 31 July).
I had hoped that the entailment rules would finally end up as complete
syntactic characterizations of entailment.  This would result in lemmas
somewhat along the following lines:

RDF(S) entailment lemma:  S rdf(s)-entails E if and only if there is a
graph that can be derived from S plus the RDF (and RDFS) axiomatic triples
by the appliation of the simple entailment rules and RDF entailment rules
(and RDFS entailment rules) which is a supergraph of E.

Instead the entailment lemmas are incomplete in a disturbing way.  The RDF
entailment lemma defers to simple entailment, which makes it an incomplete
characterization of rdf-entailment.  It would be much better to remove this
incompleteness. 

The RDFS entailment lemma also depends on simple entailment, but also has a
condition that S be rdfs-consistent.  This detracts considerably from the
utility of the RDFS entailment rules.


Peter F. Patel-Schneider
Bell Labs Research
Lucent Technologies