Re: Alternatives to OWL for linked data?

Did you look at SPIN?

http://spinrdf.org/

That should allow you do do a lot with data without leaving the now 
mainstream Semantic Web technology stack (as long as a small fragment of 
OWL is sufficient for you).

Best
Martin


Axel Rauschmayer wrote:
> I'm currently reading Hendler's brilliant book "Semantic Web for the 
> Working Ontologist". It really drove home the point that OWL is not a 
> good fit when using RDF for *data* (names are generally not unique, 
> open world assumption, ...).
>
> But what is the alternative? For my applications, I have the following 
> requirements:
>
> - Properties: transitivity, inverse, sub-properties.
> - Resources, classes: equivalence. For my purposes, equivalence is a 
> way of implementing the topic merging in topic maps [1].
> - Constraints for integrity checking.
> - Schema declaration: partially overlaps with constraints, serves for 
> documentation and for providing default values for properties.
> - Computed property values: for example, one property value being the 
> concatenation of two other property values etc.
>
> The difficulty seems to me to find something universal that fulfills 
> these requirements and is still easy to understand. Inference, when 
> used for transitivity and equivalence, is simple, but when it comes to 
> editing RDF, they can confound the user: Why can some triples be 
> replaced, others not? Why do I have to replace the triples of a 
> different instance if I want to replace the triples in my instance?
>
> While it's not necessarily easier to understand for end users, I've 
> always found Prolog easy to understand, where OWL is more of a challenge.
>
> So what solutions are out there? I would prefer description logic 
> programming to OWL. Does Prolog-like backward-chaining make sense for 
> RDF? If so, how would it be combined with SPARQL; or would it replace 
> it? Or maybe something frame-based?
>
> Am I making sense? I would appreciate any pointers, hints and insights.
>
> Axel
>
> [1] http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/index.html#desc-merging
>

-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------
martin hepp
e-business & web science research group
universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen

e-mail:  mhepp@computer.org
phone:   +49-(0)89-6004-4217
fax:     +49-(0)89-6004-4620
www:     http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group)
         http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal)
skype:   mfhepp 
twitter: mfhepp

Check out GoodRelations for E-Commerce on the Web of Linked Data!
=================================================================

Webcast:
http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/webcast/

Recipe for Yahoo SearcMonkey:
http://tr.im/rAbN

Talk at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009: 
"Semantic Web-based E-Commerce: The GoodRelations Ontology"
http://tinyurl.com/semtech-hepp

Overview article on Semantic Universe:
http://tinyurl.com/goodrelations-universe

Project page:
http://purl.org/goodrelations/

Resources for developers:
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations

Tutorial materials:
CEC'09 2009 Tutorial: The Web of Data for E-Commerce: A Hands-on Introduction to the GoodRelations Ontology, RDFa, and Yahoo! SearchMonkey 
http://tr.im/grcec09