Re: OWL and LOD

• From: Toby Inkster <tai@g5n.co.uk>
• Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 11:14:53 +0100
• To: Hugh Glaser <hg@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
• Cc: Steve Harris <steve.harris@garlik.com>, John Goodwin <john.goodwin@ordnancesurvey.co.uk>, "public-lod@w3.org" <public-lod@w3.org>, "semantic-web@w3.org" <semantic-web@w3.org>
• Message-Id: <1242209693.15673.87.camel@ophelia2.g5n.co.uk>

On Wed, 2009-05-13 at 00:59 +0100, Hugh Glaser wrote:
> But generating equivalency predicates for every conceivable domain is
> not the way to go, I would suggest.

That's not quite what I meant. Rather that OWL should provide the right
tools to enable existing domain-specific vocabularies (e.g. FOAF for
people, DOAP for software projects, DC for artifacts, etc) to define
their own equivalency properties.

Some vocabularies already have terms that could benefit from such tools.
e.g.:

 * Richard Cyganiak's XFN vocabulary's "me-hyperlink" term.
   The two pages are equivalent in that they can both be
   used to indicate the same person in XFN terms.

 * DCMI's hasFormat/isFormatOf. The two resources are
   "substantially the same [...] but in another format".

In both these cases, the resources being described are different, but
for many purposes it's useful to consider them identical.

It would be good if OWL was able to be used to express something like
this:

 [] is owl:equivRule of dc:hasFormat ;
    owl:implication [
           owl:propertyOnOne dc:title ;
           owl:propertyOnAll ex:looseTitle ;
           owl:validity owl:Always
       ] .

Which allowed us to reason:

 { _:A dc:hasFormat _:A1 , _:A2 ; 
       dc:title "Foo" . }
 =>
 { _:A  ex:looseTitle "Foo" .
   _:A1 ex:looseTitle "Foo" .
   _:A2 ex:looseTitle "Foo" . } .

-Toby

Received on Wednesday, 13 May 2009 10:15:52 UTC