Re: Annotation entailment!

A helpful use case.

OWL 1.0 annotations do *not* do this.

OWL 1.1 axiom annotations attempt to do this, I think.

This use case would also be addressed by simple (XML) comments in the 
RDF/XML source, or the N3 source.


Jeremy



Matthew Pocock wrote:
> Sorry - I am confused now. Time for a concrete use-case. I have found myself 
> converting human-readable specs into OWL more than once. It is natural to 
> want to annotate parts of the OWL as comming from parts of the spec 
> documents. The granularity for this is at the owl1.1 axiom level, annotating 
> these with the location in the source document that states the knowledge they 
> capture. I'm usually quite careful to use axioms in the OWL that are as close 
> as possible a direct translation of what is stated in the original spec, even 
> if there are other potentially more OWL-friendly ways to say it. The 
> semantics of the annotation I had assumed where that they applied to that 
> axiom, not to the set of items with identical interpretations.
> 
> In the light of what is said below, should I not be doing this with 
> annotations? To be clear, my intent was to capture a logical constraint, and 
> *that exact* way of stating it, and associating this with the source 
> reference.
> 
> Matthew (perplexed)
> 
> On Wednesday 04 July 2007, Jeremy Carroll wrote:
>> 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 Friday, 6 July 2007 07:47:52 UTC