A proposal for introducing anonymous individuals into OWL 1.1 functional-style syntax

Hello,

After considering all existing proposals, I would like to present a proposal for a possible resolution of ISSUE-3 (anonymous
individuals). This solution allows us to process more RDF graphs in OWL 1.1 DL, and it is compatible with SPARQL.

We would extend the structural specification with anonymous individuals (a.k.a. blank nodes). The Individual class in the UML
diagrams would by extended with an isAnonymous method. The functional-style grammar would be extended as follows:

<anonymousIndividual> := "the nodeID production from the Turtle document"
<anonymousOrConcreteIndividual> := <anonymousIndividual> | <individualURI>

Finally, we would replace in all axioms <individualURI> with <anonymousOrConcreteIndividual>.

This would allow us to write axioms of the following form in the functional-style syntax:

ClassAssertion( _:x C )
ObjectPropertyAssertion ( R _:x _:y )

We would update the XML syntax document to reflect this change. Finally, we would extend the semantics document to treat anonymous
individuals in exactly the same way as this is done in SPARQL. This would give us a slightly weaker semantics than what is currently
available in OWL (1.0) Full.

Please let us know how you feel about this proposal.

Regards,

	Boris

Received on Wednesday, 13 February 2008 20:01:36 UTC