Re: ISSUE-95 Discussions

There is no harm in using rdfs:isDefinedBy and may be some value in it. I am
not totally sure what it is though.

In practice, it is very rarely used for instances. Because it is not
practical, I guess, to always carry this extra triple. It is sometimes used
for schemas, but certainly far from universally used. So, from the software
perspective, it can¹t be relied on ­ unless the person who writes software
has full control over what schemas they use and how they look like.

As for living with other vocabularies in a triple store, this wouldn't
require rdfs:isDefinedBy. The best practice is to have each vocabulary as a
separate named graph and then one could always query for its content in
SPARQL using FROM or FROM GRAPH.


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From:  Holger Knublauch <holger@topquadrant.com>
Date:  Sunday, January 24, 2016 at 6:45 PM
To:  "public-data-shapes-wg@w3.org" <public-data-shapes-wg@w3.org>
Subject:  Re: ISSUE-95 Discussions
Resent-From:  <public-data-shapes-wg@w3.org>
Resent-Date:  Sun, 24 Jan 2016 23:46:09 +0000

> No, rdfs:isDefinedBy is the way to link an RDF term with its ontology.
> My XSLT relies on that. It also lets vocab information live in a
> triple store with other vocabs. You can then get all the terms for a
> given vocab using a SPARQL query.

Again, I don't like carrying around extra triples just for the sake of a
particular XSLT implementation. These triples are trivial to auto-generate
at any point in time. Having said this, for the purpose of making progress I
will try to edit them in (although I expect this to be error-prone). Better
would be to leave them out for now and put them back in on the day prior to
publication.