Re: ISSUE-94 (n-ary constucts and RDF): Problem with roundtripping when going from functional-style syntax into RDF and back

SUMMARY:

Round-tripping from the functional-style syntax through RDF/XML is not
possible in general, so there is no sense in trying to make it possible
in general.


DETAILS:

The description of ISSUE-94 talks about two kinds of round-tripping:
1/ round-tripping through OWL/RDF (whatever that is), and
2/ round-tripping through RDF graphs.

What round-tripping matters?  Well, it has to be round-tripping through
RDF/XML (OWL/XML?).  Why?  Because RDF/XML is a transfer syntax for OWL.

Round tripping into RDF graphs doesn't make sense at all.  What OWL tool
that uses the functional syntax syntax would directly care about turning
an ontology into an RDF graph?

However, round-tripping through RDF/XML is not possible in general because
there are OWL ontologies written in the functional syntax that cannot be
written in RDF/XML.  As it doesn't make sense to attempt to do something
impossible, we shouldn't be trying to ensure round-tripping through
RDF/XML in general.

Peter F. Patel-Schneider

Received on Wednesday, 23 January 2008 11:25:52 UTC