Re: Use of owl:versionInfo to record ontology version IRI in RDF

I was thinking about the same thing. There is pre-existing use of
owl:versionInfo and that will get misinterpreted in OWL 2. I think the
use of a distinct property makes sense.

-Alan

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 7:13 AM, Uli Sattler <sattler@cs.man.ac.uk> wrote:
> Dear OWL,
> Matthew Horridge found an 'unwanted feature' in the current spec when
> implementing it in the OWL API [1], see message below. This was discussed
> with Boris, who suggested:
> "I see that http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/#versionInfo-def says that the
> value
> should be a string. I guess this wouldn't be that difficult to change: we
> could
> have something like owl:versionURI in OWL 2. "
>
> I guess we should do this sooner rather than later?
> Cheers, Uli
> [1] http://owlapi.sourceforge.net/
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Matthew Horridge <matthew.horridge@cs.man.ac.uk>
> Date: 1 April 2009 13:48:37 BST
> To: Uli Sattler <sattler@cs.man.ac.uk>
> Subject: Use of owl:versionInfo to record ontology version IRI in RDF
> Hi,
>
> I realised that the OWL API wasn't translating an ontology's version IRI
> into RDF, and I was about to fix this.  However, I saw that the current
> mapping uses owl:versionInfo from OWL 1 to encode this.  I just wondered
> whether or not another property was considered.  The reason is that the OWL
> 1 spec states that the value of the versionInfo property is a string.
>  Because of this, it might not be possible to parse the versionInfo property
> of an existing ontology into an IRI.  There might also be several
> versionInfo annotations on an ontology, and in this case it's not clear
> which one to choose.
>
> As an example of an ontology that would be difficult to parse correctly,
> consider the pizza ontology at
>
> http://www.co-ode.org/ontologies/pizza/2007/02/12/pizza.owl
>
> Rightly or wrongly, this ontology has three versionInfo annotations and all
> of them are general comments about what went into successive versions of the
> ontology.  I've seen other ontologies like this as well.
>
> Would it be possible (if it's not too late, wouldn't cause too much trouble
> etc.) to coin a new piece of vocab to store the version URI of an ontology?
>  Something like  ontologyVersion?  Also, would it be possible to specify
> what to do when there are multiple version IRIs?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Matthew
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 7.4.1 owl:versionInfo
> An owl:versionInfo statement generally has as its object a string giving
> information about this version, for example RCS/CVS keywords. This statement
> does not contribute to the logical meaning of the ontology other than that
> given by the RDF(S) model theory.
>
> Although this property is typically used to make statements about
> ontologies, it may be applied to any OWL construct. For example, one could
> attach a owl:versionInfo statement to an OWL class.
>
> NOTE: owl:versionInfo is an instance of owl:AnnotationProperty.
>
>

Received on Thursday, 2 April 2009 12:28:19 UTC