[OWLWG-COMMENT] ISSUE-67 (reification): real semantic-free RDF-comments

[Comment to OWL-WG discussion; posted to involved WG-members]

Hi, Ian and Jeremy!

Just a small speculative comment on Jeremy's idea to use XML comments for
representing real semantic-free comments in OWL's RDF syntax:

In

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-wg/2007Nov/0461.html

Ian Horrocks answered to Jeremy Carroll:

>> More constructively, what I am hearing, I think, is that the  
>> requirement is for comments that have no semantics and just fit  
>> into the specification in the right way.
>>
>> In RDF/XML there has always been the capability to have such  
>> comments - they look like:
>>
>> <!--
>>  This is a comment, it has no bearing on the formal semantics of  
>> the document.
>> -->
>>
>> It may be possible to provide say, an informative GRDDL transform  
>> from an XML version of the axioms, to RDF/XML, and back again, that  
>> round trips comments appropriately.
> 
> As you probably recall, this was discussed and dismissed in the  
> WebOnt working group for the reason that it is much too low-level (it  
> is a feature of XML), and that such comments may be lost when  
> documents are processed. What you propose w.r.t. GRDDL sounds more  
> like a hack than a realistic solution. Moreover, this mechanism would  
> hardly satisfy the requirement to have a more comprehensive framework  
> that allowed (at least) for annotating axioms as well as entities.

What comes to my mind is what's actually missing are "RDF comments", i.e.
comments which belong to an RDF graph, but which are not interpreted (all
triples within an RDF graph are always interpreted according to RDF
semantics). I am thinking about comments for URI resources, data values,
bNodes(?), whole triples, and possibly even subgraphs. This would make it
possible to really map both entity and axiom annotations in the Functional
Syntax to semantic-free comments in RDF. Of course, for every RDF
serialization language there would also have to be some specific
serialization for comments, but this would be an RDF issue, and would be
completely transparent to OWL.

Well, as I said, this is a very speculative discussion, because there are no
such RDF comments at the moment, and so this does not help us any further in
the current situation. But should RDF get its own "RDF-1.1"-WG in some near
future, this might be a new feature to be considered. And then, perhaps,
already the next OWL-WG could use this new feature for creating a proper
RDF-mapping of real semantic-free comments (and perhaps deprecate the
annotation mapping which comes out from the current WG :-)).

Ah, and please don't ask me about any technical details of such an RDF
comment feature! All the comments in this post were just... speculative. ;-)

Cheers,
Michael

--
Dipl.-Inform. Michael Schneider
FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik Karlsruhe
Abtl. Information Process Engineering (IPE)
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Email: Michael.Schneider@fzi.de
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Received on Tuesday, 27 November 2007 20:54:23 UTC