Re: What is it that's wrong with rdf:List [summary]

Greetings.

On 2010 Jun 19, at 15:47, Norman Gray wrote:

> In summary, it seems that:
> 
>  * rdf:List isn't fundamentally defective, but
>  * it is often at least inconvenient to use with SPARQL, and
>  * it collides with OWL, which has hijacked rdf:List for internal use.

As a couple of people have pointed out, this last remark is harsh, or at least chronologically misleading, since rdf:List appeared in RDF at the behest of the OWL people, who wanted to use it to express OWL in RDF.  It appears, however, that the construct is used by OWL in such a way (Pat coined 'prejacked') as to make it at least inconvenient to use rdf:List in triples which will be presented to an OWL reasoner.

So is rdf:List any different from the other parts of RDF(S) excluded from OWL-DL/Lite <http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-semantics/mapping.html#4.2>?  I can see that other elements of that excluded list are problematic for reasoning because in RDF(S) they have domains or members which are largely unrestricted, which could clearly complicate reasoning about them.  It sounds (to me, possibly naively) that rdf:List is included in that list for rather more technical reasons, and that this may account for the slight air of aggrievedness (is that too strong?) which hangs around it.

Best wishes,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk

Received on Monday, 21 June 2010 07:36:55 UTC