Re: Transitive?

I seems redundant to define a property as transitive and then use that as 
a prefix on every use of the property. Begs the question of what subclass, 
type, or instance isn't transitive, or what those words mean if the prefix 
word is missing.


Jim Amsden, Senior Technical Staff Member
OSLC and Linked Lifecycle Data
919-525-6575




From:   Holger Knublauch <holger@topquadrant.com>
To: 
Date:   05/16/2016 08:11 AM
Subject:        Transitive?



Our recent editorial experiments were to use the terms SHACL instance, 
SHACL type and SHACL subclass. I don't find this very attractive to read 
and it gives room to misinterpretation too, e.g. people could read it as 
if we were using different properties than rdf:type or rdfs:subClassOf.

Looking at the RDFS spec [1], we can read

     "The rdfs:subClassOf property is transitive".

This is exactly the relevant bit of "inferencing" that we are using in 
SHACL too.

So why can't we switch to the terms

- transitive subclass
- transitive type
- transitive instance

which should be relatively unambiguous esp given that each usage of 
these terms is now hyperlinked to the terminology section. Furthermore 
transitivity even carries a fairly appropriate meaning:

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitive_relation

Regards,
Holger

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/#ch_subclassof