- From: Jeremy Carroll <jjc@hpl.hp.com>
- Date: Wed, 04 Jul 2007 15:17:41 +0100
- To: Denny Vrandecic <dvr@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de>
- CC: Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>, OWL list <public-owl-dev@w3.org>
Summary: why is this an issue? What are you trying to annotate, and why?
Why are you using this mechanism?
======================
The question is why are you using rdfs:label or eg:lastModifiedOn or
whatever rather than <!-- XML Comments -->.
If you want an annotation that is entirely invisible, except in an
editor, the XML specification provides that mechanism:
<!--
-->
If you use some other mechanism, then it is in order to get additional
functionality.
The functionality that OWL DL annotations provide is:
- the annotation is part of the RDF graph
- some basic semantics is provided.
- the annotation is regarded as an annotation of the interpretation of
the items in the graph, rather than an annotation of the graph syntax.
i.e.
There is a mechanism to annotate the XML syntax: XML comments.
There is a mechanism to annotate the individuals properties and classes
in the ontology.
There is no mechanism to annotate the graph syntax.
===
If a mechanism for annotating the graph syntax is desired, one method
would be to create a new annotation property eg:annotatedGraph that
takes an RDF/XML literal as its object.
If your ontology is a set of triples O with name U, and O includes
U rdf:type owl:Ontology
then set
O' = O union
{ U eg:annotatedGraph X^rdf:XMLLiteral }
where X is a serialization of O, including appropriate XML comments.
This provides a simple mechanism allowing annotations of the graph as a
graph, (i.e. reading in, and writing it out does not loose the comments,
but the comments have [no/vanishing little] semantic force).
Jeremy
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Received on Wednesday, 4 July 2007 14:18:14 UTC