[dxwg] Inheritance terminology not appropriate for RDFS and OWL (#1228)

rawmatt has just created a new issue for https://github.com/w3c/dxwg:

== Inheritance terminology not appropriate for RDFS and OWL ==
4 places in [the Recommendation](https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat-2/#Class:Catalog) refer to "_The following properties are inherited from the super-class_". The problem with this is that there is no concept of inheritance in the RDFS and OWL ecosystem.

From the OWL2 Primer:
> Furthermore, OWL is a strictly declarative and logical language. OWL therefore has none of the operational aspects of OOP, like methods, and similarly reasoning in OWL is strictly logical, with nothing comparing to inheritance, particularly inheritance with exceptions or overriding. - https://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/draft/ED-owl2-primer-20090414/

In my opinion, referring to Sub-Properties as Inheritance is mis-leading. The term is not defined in the normative references, and therefore leaves the statement ambiguous.

My personal experience implementing DCAT v2  is using OOP terminology causes implementers to incorrectly assume normal OOP semantics.

Please consider removing OOP terminology and replacing with RDFS and OWL terminology.

Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/dxwg/issues/1228 using your GitHub account

Received on Monday, 30 March 2020 16:04:42 UTC