LC Comment: Names for axioms

This is the result of discussions with people at Manchester working on  
a collaboration with Siemens Medical Health Services (i.e., an  
industrial project). The immediate overall goal is to support so  
called "stand off" annotations on axioms...that is, axiom annotations  
that are not a structural part of an axiom they annotate. Such  
annotations could be stored in separate documents (for example).

The simplest feature that would support this would be the ability to  
name axioms with a URI. This ability is, I think, present in OWL Full.  
Adding it to the functional syntax would be straightforward enough but  
require touching lots of things. One could also have a special  
annotation, "owl:axiomName".

Note that Matthew Pocock raised this way back when:
	<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-dev/2007JanMar/0067.html 
 >
and we sorta reached agreement that a canonical annotation would do  
the job. It's fairly important that it be canonical so as to ensure  
interop (i.e., not having multiple naming conventions).

Manchester does not want this issue to force another last call on its  
own. However, if another last call is necessary for other reasons, we  
would like this special annotation to be added to the spec.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Friday, 23 January 2009 21:14:31 UTC