Re: Comments on last-call SPARQL draft 20050721, section 2

On Sep 12, 2005, at 7:15 AM, Seaborne, Andy wrote:

>
> Editorial changes made in response to
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg-comments/2005Sep/ 
> 0002
>
> Not all the comments are editorial.
>
> Someone might care to comment on the OWL and literals-as-subjects  
> comment.

See below.

> Graham Klyne wrote:
[snip]
> ...
>> Section 2.3
>> Concerning the reference to literals-as-subjects.  Is this still an  
>> option for the Semantic Web family?  I understand that OWL (or  
>> OWL-DL) requires that subjects be URIs.  Maybe not a problem, but I  
>> thought I'd mention it.
>
> Not editorial.
> Comments?

RDF through OWL syntactically forbids literals-as-subjects. However,  
OWL Full allows for equality relations between data values and abstract  
individuals. So, semantically, there is already a sense in which the  
OWL Family allows for literal subjects.

Furthermore, there a smooth path to OWL-DL with subjects as  
literals...first order logic certainly allows for the first place of  
two place predicates to have data values (when it admits such values at  
all) and OWL-DL is a proper subset of FOL. It could be that certain  
extensions to literal subjects would be undecidable, but so's SWRL for  
example. I would expect that a forml of AL-Log would allow for literal  
subjects and robust decidability.

In fact, if you were careful about equalities and class membership, it  
might be a reasonable addition to regular OWL-DL.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.

Received on Monday, 12 September 2005 13:14:02 UTC