Re: Alternatives to OWL for linked data?

Thanks, looks interesting. I've also found related work:
https://www.uni-koblenz-landau.de/koblenz/fb4/institute/IFI/AGStaab/Research/systeme/NetworkedGraphs/

But there does not seem to be a library one can use with, say, Sesame.

On Jul 24, 2009, at 15:43 , Martin Hepp (UniBW) wrote:

> 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
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>
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> =================================================================
>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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-- 
Axel.Rauschmayer@ifi.lmu.de
http://www.pst.ifi.lmu.de/~rauschma/

Received on Friday, 24 July 2009 14:35:15 UTC