Asset as superclass of Policy / Asset not superclass of Policy. Asset same as Thing.

Hi all,

>From http://www.w3.org/community/odrl/wiki/Feedback_from_Victor_6_July_2013#5._Asset_as_superclass_of_Policy_.2F_Asset_not_superclass_of_Policy._Asset_same_as_Thing.

Comment: All the policies are certainly assets, although perhaps it is not needed that much to stress that all the policies are assets (they are not disjoint classes, either) Policy can be sublclass of Asset. But please note that by making Asset same as Thing, we say that all the assets are things –what is fine–, and that all the things are assets, what may be considered wrong: Asset is defined as “Content that is subject to an ODRL policy”. Not all the assets are subject to ODRL policies.

Proposed action [ upm ]: We strongly recommend not making Asset the same as Thing.


I disagree with this proposed action, and put forward that it's a spec wording issue, created by the fact that the ODRL spec only deals from the outset with those things which are already subject to an ODRL policy whereas the RDF ontology exists within a wider universe.

My reasoning is that as proposed, in order to define that a ODRL policy applies to something, it becomes necessary to specify that it is _also_ an Asset (in addition to whatever classes it may be identified at that point); to not do so becomes a spec violation by default, even though defining something as an Asset without an accompany ODRL policy is essentially meaningless, and not defining something as an Asset but still applying an ODRL policy to it has a clear implied intent. By my reckoning, this places an unnecessary burden upon implementors.

Therefore, I propose maintaining the sameAs relationship between Asset and owl:Thing, and instead modify the spec to define Asset as any thing to which an ODRL policy might be applied (and leave it to the evolution of society, legal frameworks, and so on, to decide what that might be at any given time: if somebody asserts that an ODRL policy applies which is unenforceable because one can't legally or morally apply it, it's no different to an unenforceable policy for any other reason).

Cheers,

M.

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Mo McRoberts - Analyst - BBC Archive Development,
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Received on Monday, 15 July 2013 08:10:15 UTC