Re: Responses to LC comments DA1 and SR1

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 9:34 AM, Michael Schneider<schneid@fzi.de> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> My 2 cents:
>
> * [SR1]:
>
> I agree that such kinds of guidelines are off-scope for us.
>
> However, I think that the following sentence does not fully
> answer to the comment:
>
> [[
> Further, the imports mechanism of OWL provides a means
> for really pointing back to the document or documents
> that provide the current defining characteristics of a term.
> ]]
>
> The imports mechanism relates whole ontologies, not single
> terms (classes and properties). Therefore, I suggest to
> remove this sentence from the response.

In addition, although the reader use the definite article "the" for
defining document, the documentation for isDefinedBy has no such
restriction: http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/#ch_isdefinedby

Therefore I would rather omit that part too, or have the rdfs spec own
that there might be more than one, rather than the WG.

Also, arguably, since we mention isDefinedBy in our specifications,
it's not out of the question that someone might expect us to have an
opinion about its use.

How about:

The working group notes that it is the RDF Schema that defines the
property rdfs:isDefinedBy[1], as follows:

rdfs:isDefinedBy is an instance of rdf:Property that is used to
indicate a resource defining the subject resource. This property may
be used to indicate an RDF vocabulary in which a resource is
described.
A triple of the form: "S rdfs:isDefinedBy O" states that the resource
O defines S. It may be possible to retrieve representations of O from
the Web, but this is not required. When such representations may be
retrieved, no constraints are placed on the format of those
representations. rdfs:isDefinedBy is a subproperty of rdfs:seeAlso.

Giving guidance that modifies the existing specification is outside
our charter. We note, however, that the current documentation does not
imply that there be a single value for the property, that having the
target of rdfs:isDefinedBy be both the OntologyIRI and the VersionIRI
in separate statements does not therefore seem inconsistent with the
documentation, and that because of this you might consider that the
two options you present in your comment might not be exclusive of each
other.

---

We don't have to quote the definition from rdfs, but I don't see that it hurts.

-Alan

Received on Monday, 22 June 2009 16:58:20 UTC