Punning on ontology IRIs in OWL 2 DL

Hi!

Can anyone please confirm or refute the following assumptions?

I believe that OWL 2 DL allows to pun on ontology IRIs. For example, it seems to be syntactically allowed (or better: not forbidden) to write:

  ex:o rdf:type owl:Ontology .

  ex:C rdf:type owl:Class .
  ex:p rdf:type owl:ObjectProperty .

  ex:o rdf:type ex:C .
  ex:o ex:p ex:foo .

I further believe that the latter two axioms would have semantic consequences, since they actually seem to be assertions about some regular individual referred to by the IRI "ex:o".

As a use case, this would make sense if an ontology contains ontology "annotations" using the DC vocabulary terms, while (re-)declaring the different DC terms to be regular classes, object properties, and data properties.

Best,
Michael

--
Dipl.-Inform. Michael Schneider
Research Scientist, Information Process Engineering (IPE)
Tel  : +49-721-9654-726
Fax  : +49-721-9654-727
Email: michael.schneider@fzi.de
WWW  : http://www.fzi.de/michael.schneider

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Received on Monday, 17 January 2011 13:26:01 UTC