Re: Lang: owl:ontolgy

At 1:53 PM -0400 9/13/02, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
>Here is a definition of ontologies that fits into the opposite end of the
>spectrum from Jim's.
>
>Abstract Syntax View:
>
>An ontology is a syntactic construct that consists of a collection of
>1/ facts and axioms;
>2/ inclusions of other ontologies;
>3/ extra-logical information about the ontology, such as creater, etc.
>
>RDF/XML View:
>
>An ontology is an RDF/XML document whose rdf:RDF element has the inclusions
>and extra-logical information as attributes and the facts and axioms in its
>elements.

how will you make it so the rdf:RDF element can
   i. handle "structured" data - you make every extralogical thing be 
a single element tag (i.e. not an RDF graph) because you cannot embed 
a graph in the <rdf:RDF>
  ii. The entities within the rdf:RDF cannot get their own URIs.  This 
would strongly limit the linking of ontologies that many of us think 
is important

>
>
>The meaning of an ontology is the combination of the meaning of the facts
>and axioms in it plus the meaning of the ontologies included in it.
>
>
>RDF View:
>
>An ontology is an RDF graph, containing the axioms and facts of the
>ontology and the axioms and facts of all included ontologies and their
>included ontologies, etc.
>
>That's it.

strangely enough, this is the solution I wanted to use, but the real 
problem is that the rdf:RDF is too limited -- the idea of creating 
the ontologyDefines tag is that you get exactly the same 
functionality as the above without imposing these limits.
  -JH
-- 
Professor James Hendler				  hendler@cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-731-3822 (Cell)
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler

Received on Friday, 13 September 2002 14:33:48 UTC