- From: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>
- Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2008 14:12:35 +0000
- To: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>
- Cc: OWL Working Group WG <public-owl-wg@w3.org>
On Jan 13, 2008, at 2:03 PM, Bijan Parsia wrote: > On Jan 13, 2008, at 1:23 PM, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote: > [snip] >> Hmm, but this is not complete with respect to entailment in the RDF >> semantics, as far as I can tell. > [snip] > > It is, in fact, not complete. > > I regard that fact as a feature, not a bug. It is more important to > be backward compatible with universal practice, expectation, etc. > than with a (IMHO) buggy (rather, mal-designed) prior spec. [snip] I realized that though I sincerely didn't mean it that way, this very easily read as in a highly inflammatory tone. I certainly don't mean to suggest that it was obvious at the time of its design that it was broken. At the time, I certainly thought it was a reasonable, even sensible, and 'clean' approach. My subsequent experience with it both in the rdf and owl worlds was that it is entirely wrong. It is simply ignored by users and implementors, and specs like SPAQRL and RIF ignore that bit as well. It causes theoretical problem (with practical impact) at even the RDF/RDFS level) etc. etc. Hence, I feel like we shouldn't be strongly bound by the letter of the spec. I believe treating BNodes as skolem constants will enhance the interoperability of RDF and OWL systems and be the least surprising for users and that these considerations are strong enough to override the requirement for spec compatibility. Cheers, Bijan.
Received on Sunday, 13 January 2008 14:12:45 UTC