Re: POWDER-S Schema - revised version

On Thu Oct  2 14:56:04 2008 Phil Archer said:

>
> Andrea, Stasinos,
>
> Thank you for pursuing this, I can see that it is not simple - but I'm  
> hoping that between you it's possible to decide on a way forward. For me  
> the important things are:
>
> 1. At the moment, FOAF is the vocab that a lot of people use and  
> therefore we should support it. foaf:Agent must be a possible object of  
> wdrs:issuedby.
>
> 2. dcterms:Agent has greater formal long term stability and we should  
> therefore make it possible to use that as the object of wdrs:issuedby as  
> well.
>
> 3. We should not make any statement that in any way affects the  
> semantics of either of those external vocabularies.

Under the strict interpretation of "the formal specification of
wdr:issuedby must be such that, as it stands, does not affect the
semantics of either external vocabulary". The *potential* to affect said
semantics by adding triples that make assertions about the domain or
range of wdr:issuedby, or subordinate wdr:issuedby under another
property is not covered by this statement.

This leaves both A1 and A2 open.

The stronger interpretation (covering potential damages) closes
up option A2.

> 4. IMO, we should /only/ support those two, but, this may not be best  
> practice. If we make it so that other hypothetical Agent classes can be  
> used, I don't think anyone will object. In general, the fewer  
> restrictions that apply to a vocab term the better.

If *only* is a requirement, A1 is the only way forward, as far as I
can tell. But I might be wrong.

> 5. We always used to use rdf:Description to describe the POWDER-S doc.  
> We changed to owl:Ontology in response to a comment from Ivan. If the  
> present discussion means that we should go back and revert to  
> rdf:Description, OK, we can do that. As I recall, it was a suggestion  
> from Ivan, no more.

Like I said, rolling back owl:Ontology only allows us to syntactically
pretend we are OK, although in essence no instance can ever be an
rdf:Description and an owl:Thing.

s

Received on Sunday, 5 October 2008 14:50:34 UTC