- From: Alan Rector <rector@cs.man.ac.uk>
- Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:09:19 +0000
- To: public-owl-comments@w3.org
All Looking over the spec for OWL annotations again in the Syntax Spec - thanks for all the work - I realise that we have a number of use- cases for having OWL expressions rather than just IRIs as the values of annotations. Once suggested, several others have chimed in with other use cases. I know it is late in the day, but ... Briefly, some use cases are: * Mapping applications between ontologies where full logical equivalence/subsumption cannot be, or has not yet been, achieved. When mapping to thesauri and other artefacts that are explicitly linguistic or associational rather than logical, this is very common. * Stored queries & test expressions & related maintenance information. * Various information maintained for handling collaboration, e.g. alternative definitions of the "same" entity under consideration. * Cross reference links within the ontology where we don't want to create a named class explicitly to clutter the hierarchy * To be able to retain as annotations axioms whose proper inclusion kills classifiers. Keeping them with the original ontology for integrity is important, even if they have to be censored In each of these cases we want to a) have the expression be a syntactically legal (but not necessarily satisfiable) OWL expression using the identifiers/names in the ontology; b) track identifier/name changes within the ontology so that the referential integrity of the expression is conserved even through updates, version changes etc. Strings rapidly rust. For the same reason that we need entities (or IRs in the ontology) in annotations, we need expressions made up of those those IRIs are treated in the same way - essentially "anonymous class value") Regards Alan ----------------------- ----------------------- Alan Rector Professor of Medical Informatics School of Computer Science University of Manchester Manchester M13 9PL, UK TEL +44 (0) 161 275 6149/6188 FAX +44 (0) 161 275 6204 www.cs.man.ac.uk/mig www.co-ode.org
Received on Tuesday, 16 December 2008 10:09:55 UTC