OWL dot OWL file

I believe that what we were referring to in our discussion last week,  
and what Holger is asking for [1], is what in OWL 1 was called the  
"RDF Schema of OWL" [2]. As is explained in Section 1.7 [3]:

"This schema provides information about the OWL vocabulary that could  
be a useful reference point for ontology builders and tool  
developers. The restrictions provided by the schema on the OWL  
classes and properties are informative and not complete. Also, this  
schema does not make distinctions between OWL Full, OWL DL and OWL  
Lite."

The idea is to use RDFS to describe the structure of OWL syntax --  
i.e., it aims to be a kind of "meta-schema". For example, it  
specifies the range and domain of the properties used in the OWL  
syntax. Unfortunately, RDFS isn't even close to being capable of  
describing the structure completely, so the schema is highly  
incomplete, and so of limited utility. However, I don't immediately  
see the harm in updating it slightly for OWL 2 given that we have had  
more than one request. I believe that this is what was proposed by  
several people during the teleconf. Presumably we would arrange for  
this updated version to be served from [4]?

Note that this shouldn't be confused with Michael's suggestion to  
augment the RDF-based semantics with a set of axiomatic triples  
(which is, IMHO, a reasonable but completely unrelated proposal).

Regards,
Ian

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-owl-comments/2009Jul/ 
0007.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/#appB
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/#AppendixList
[4] http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#

Received on Tuesday, 21 July 2009 05:47:23 UTC