axiom URIs

Hi,

I've been browsing arround the OWL 1.1 draft spec. It's much more readable 
than the 1.0 spec. The UML diagrams realy help me. Where would I send any 
typos I find?

Axiom is associated with annotations, which is great. Would it be possible to 
associate an optional URI with every axiom? This would allow tools to 
uniquely 'pull out' an axiom from an ontology without needing to know its 
structural identity. This is specifically intended to provide a mechanism for 
axiom naming/identification that stands seperate from and orthogonal to 
concept naming.

The use-cases I have are allong the following sorts of lines:

* An application is working with an ontology, and selects some axioms that it 
wishes to mark as interesting. It places their URIs into a message that gets 
sent to a server. The server also contains a copy of the same ontology, and 
using the URIs, it now knows which axioms the client is interested in. A 
variation on this theme is where there are several ontologies (or just axiom 
sets) in an application, and parts of each one are aggregated by URI 
reference into a merged axiom set.

* An ontology is being commented on in a blog/wiki/[insert own external 
document here], and the author wishes to comment on a specific axiom in the 
ontology. They can write down the full URI of that axiom and comment on it 
cleanly, without needing to duplicate it or refer to the concept it 
contributes to.

* During versioning, axioms are added or removed from a concept. It is 
necisary to keep track of this, and to annotate the axioms themselves with 
the rational for editing them, in addition to any comments on the concepts. 
However, this information is held in a bug-tracking or source versioning 
application, not within the OWL-XML.

Best practice would, I guess, be to define an xml namespace prefix for axiom 
URIs that is distinct from the xml namespace prefix for the concepts 
introduced. It would probably be very important for people working with these 
things to keep axiom URIs seperate from concept URIs just for the sake of 
sanity. Also, it would be unfortunate if the axiom URI xml attribute name 
clashed with the concept URI xml attribute name.

Matthew

Received on Monday, 22 January 2007 20:25:59 UTC