Building on parts of RDFS (was: Shapes, Individuals, and Classes - OSLC Motivations)

This is actually an interesting and important discussion to have, and I 
believe Arnaud brought this up in the weekly call this morning:

If we use for example rdfs:subClassOf do we also have to buy into other 
features of the RDFS namespace, and its whole semantic interpretation? 
I.e. is it all or nothing? Similar, can we use owl:imports without 
claiming full OWL support?

In my opinion there is no such dependency, and it would require us to 
rely on mechanisms that were invented with other use cases and therefore 
no longer fit (for closed-world constraint checking). For the core 
architecture of shapes, I definitely would want us to reuse rdf:type, 
rdfs:subClassOf and rdfs:subPropertyOf, because otherwise we would 
create a parallel universe that doesn't allow people to reuse existing 
ontologies and instances. But I would not want to rely on rdfs:range and 
domain for example, as explained elsewhere. I'd rather see something 
like schema.org's rangeIncludes.

As a more basic comment that others will disagree with, I don't believe 
that RDFS/OWL have been particularly successful so far in bringing the 
semantic web ideas to their full potential. Therefore I do not feel we 
should assume that all pre-existing standards are the end of the story. 
We should cherry-pick the good ideas and leave the other ideas to their 
own niches that they were created for.

Holger




On 11/13/14, 9:13 AM, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
> On 11/12/2014 02:31 PM, Holger Knublauch wrote:
>>
>> On 11/13/14, 8:24 AM, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
>>> RDFS is part of the RDF spec, so we do not have to go beyond the RDF 
>>> spec to
>>> get the benefits of RDFS.
>>
>> Which benefits do you mean? Inferencing?
>>
>> (In general I admit I often find your statements enigmatic. It's 
>> often unclear
>> to me what solution you are proposing).
>
> Well, then I'm having the effect I want.
>
> At this point I'm not advocating or even proposing a solution.  I am, 
> however, trying to tease out just what others are advocating or 
> proposing and pointing out statements that are not correct.
>
> The statement here was that RDFS is not part of the RDF spec. That's 
> not true.  To get the benefits of RDFS (any maybe I should have said, 
> if any) you don't need to go beyond the RDF spec.
>
>
>
>
> I do also believe that RDFS has benefits, namely its notions of a 
> class and property hierarchy and domains and ranges on properties. 
> (I'm not saying that RDFS is the best ontology language, or even a 
> very good one, but RDFS does provide some interesting capabilities.)
>
>
>> Holger
>
> peter
>

Received on Wednesday, 12 November 2014 23:32:14 UTC