Re: Action-164 suggestions (again) for unnamed individuals *in addition* to bnodes

On 2 Jul 2008, at 12:00, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:

> Fulfilling action-164, Here is a pointer to the email when I first  
> suggested we consider supporting both bnodes and unnamed (for the  
> user) individuals.
>
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-wg/2007Nov/0214.html
>
> Snippet, omitting unrelated, but not current suggestions.
>
> It seems to me that we could actually support both.
>
>> Individual(type(owl:Thing)) could be a skolem
>> SomeIndividual(type(owl:Thing)) could be an existential.

This imposes a tree like restriction on the first.

> That is, we could offer two forms of anonymous individual  
> constructors. Neither would specify a name. One form of constructor  
> would allocate a unique (to exceedingly high probability) name. The  
> other would use a bnode, interpreted using the usual existential  
> semantics.
>
> Tree-shape restrictions would hold for the existentials, but not  
> for the other kinds of anonymous individuals.

This would make entailment undecidable.

It also doesn't address the legacy issue that people use bnodes as if  
they were skolem. We could consider evangelizing not using bnodes in  
RDF when skolem semantics were meant, but I don't see that working  
well anytime soon without a *big* push.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Wednesday, 2 July 2008 11:10:04 UTC