Re: new treatment of anonymous individual really necessary?

Frank van Harmelen <Frank.van.Harmelen@cs.vu.nl> wrote:
> OWL2 introduces a new treatment anonymous individuals (explicitly naming
> them). This change is poorly motivated (if motivated at all), no
> supporting use-case is listed. It is a matter of taste whether this is
> an improvement or not. Given this, we suggest to remove this additional
> departure from OWL1.

Amsterdam is a village, and the gossip trail told me that this comment 
caused confusion, possibly caused by confusion on my/our side.

Here is my attempt to clarify what I thought I meant, so that you can 
diagnose if I'm confused, and if this is any reason to fix/clarify a 
document somewhere.

Frank.
    ---

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The OWL2 doc. on "New Features and rationale" says in section 2.7.3 that

In contrast, in OWL 2 anonymous individuals are identified using node IDs.

  PropertyAssertion( a:city _:1 a:Quahog )

If I understand it correctly, this notation introduces a name for the
"anonymous" individual (namely _:1), so that we can then later refer to
this "anonymous" individual.

I'm not in itself objecting to this new syntax but
(a) it's not clear from the doc. whether the OWL1 syntax is still allowed, and
(b) no reason at all is given why this new syntax is introduced

Received on Wednesday, 18 February 2009 13:32:07 UTC