Re: RDF Recommendation Set comments (re agenda for 6th April)

On Apr 6, 2011, at 10:19 AM, fensel wrote:

> At 13:39 06.04.2011, Pierre-Antoine Champin wrote:
>> On 04/06/2011 05:14 AM, Pat Hayes wrote:
>> > We might want to think about incorporating some version of sameAs
>> > into RDFS, as this seems to be fundamental to linked data and also
>> > widely misused. Having the real meaning of equality exposed in the
>> > RDF standard itself might be doing the world a favor. (?)
>> 
>> +1e99
> 
> I think this may be a very bad idea. You would force all languages
> layering on top of RDF to include equality.

It depends what you mean by 'include'. A language based on RDF can always declare that it will use some other term and refuse to accept the RDF one, just as OWL uses owl:Thing rather than rdf:Resource.  BUt it would be more useful and more in the spirit of interoperability to use the same term and just acknowledge that it is not using all the intended meaning of that term.  

> There are reasons
> to prevent equality because it turns unification from a syntactical
> operation into reasoning.

Only if you claim to be logically complete. A reasoner can always just ignore the equalities, or use them in a limited but useful way. Reasoners are not *obliged* to squeeze every last drop of meaning from all the RDF they encounter. Still, the RDF means what it means :-)

Pat

> 
> Dieter 
> 

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Received on Wednesday, 6 April 2011 16:23:19 UTC