Proliferation of types

In separate discussions with Bijan (via chat) and Boris, I've raised  
the issue that from a Web language usage point of view, the  
proliferation of typing terms is a problem (the size of the OWL  
language will now be twice what it was, which is a way to discourage  
usage IMO).  - A couple of ideas have come up.  It appears to be that  
if we could either have a way to enumerate all the classes and  
properties in an ontology (both local and remote) or if we could do  
some language design to simplify things -- for example, to make this  
one feature in the RDF with some keys -- ie. some thing like having  
one Datayping property construct to which the many different types  
are key attiributes or something like that.  Boris and I also agreed  
that we could not think of any reason why anyone would ever want a  
datatype and an objecttype property with the same name -- so if we  
added to the OWL namespace document that these two kinds of  
properties are disjoint, then we would be able to rule out the case  
of a consistent ontology ever having this done, which would therefore  
make parsing/processing easier, and we might not need so many  
property types.
  (apologies to Bijan and Boris for any misquoting I've done in  
explaining what I thought we said)
  I have created a wiki page for this at "PropertyProliferationControl
   -JH

Received on Tuesday, 13 November 2007 03:12:46 UTC