Re: Allowed types of punning (ISSUE-114)

On 10 Jul 2008, at 12:25, Rob Shearer wrote:

> I believe I might have been the person who raised the initial issue  
> about object-property/data-property punning,

I don't think so, but we'd have to go back to the archives. See  
Peter's prior message.

> but was not a party the process of fixing the problem. I continue  
> to feel that such punning is a) not useful, and b) extremely likely  
> to cause (and exacerbate existing) user error. User confusion  
> between object and data properties is quite common in practice, and  
> right now misuse can be detected as a syntax error. Allowing such  
> punning would make these common errors completely undetectable

This isn't true at all. It's perfectly detectable, just not a syntax  
error. You can detect it syntactically and a good lint tool should do  
exactly that.

> ---users would just get very different semantic effects than they  
> intended. I very much hope we're not going to re-open an issue that  
> has already been addressed and solved.


It seems that if, as Alan has argued, that not having property/object  
punning makes punning in general more confusing such that we have to  
add more restrictions, then that seems like new information. I, for  
one, when agreeing to remove data/object (and class/datatype) punning  
thought that the primary issue that necessitated removal was the RDF  
disambiguation problem. (The precise semantics of cardinality over  
punned properties is an issue, but not one that formed the primary  
basis of the decision.)

Given the new information, it's perfectly reasonable to revisit the  
issue.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Thursday, 10 July 2008 11:37:57 UTC