Re: Drilling into the LOD Cloud

On 29 Sep 2008, at 00:51, Peter Ansell wrote:

> That is fine for classes, but how do you map individuals without  
> metadata side-effects?

The simple answer is "you can't", at least in general. The trick with  
equivalentClass (and property) is that it takes equivalence with  
respect to a particular facet of the individual: its 'class-ness'. See  
also OWL 2 punning (as far as I understand it), where you'd think  
about [X qua class] and [X qua individual]. For a generic individual  
we have no facets.

Now there's not necessarily a problem here. There are plenty of  
perfectly good uses for sameAs: foo:Tony_Blair owl:sameAs  
bar:Tony_Blair. But what about foo:Gordon_Brown owl:sameAs  
bar:PM_of_UK? foo:Geo_China owl:sameAs bar:PRC?

There's a huge literature about these issues, which ought to be  
warning enough that there's no simple solution. And a neutral term  
equivalentTo strikes me as virtually useless. So go for the easy  
patches, things like sameConceptAs and the frbr-ish sameWorkAs. They  
cover a lot of what we want to do. I could see sameGeoRegion having  
some utility in the future, and no doubt others can chip in more.

These are my Monday morning thoughts, so be warned.

Damian

Received on Monday, 29 September 2008 08:59:58 UTC