Re: rdfs:Schema

On Wednesday, 29 August 2012, Yves Raimond wrote:

> **
>
> Hello!
>
> A colleague of mine was writing a specification generation software for
> web ontologies recently, and as part of his testing on multiple RDFS
> vocabularies, noticed that most of them use the OWL namespace just for its
> owl:Ontology class, to describe the vocabulary itself.
>
> Would it make sense to create a new rdfs:Schema class, to make it simpler
> for people to create basic vocabularies, without having to involve OWL at
> all?
>
> Thanks for the suggestion. I would advise against this:

1. There are lots of bits of OWL that it is good to use, even if you don't
buy the whole DL vision. For example, knowing about class disjointness,
property inverses, FPs and IFPs. Having the OWL 'Ontology' class can serve
as a gateway drug to these useful extras.

2. You push work onto consumers; everyone who previously queried for owl:
Ontology would now have to check for rdfs: Schema too.

3. Are there any members of one of these classes that are not also in the
other? If yes, I fear this will confuse. If no, then this is purely
cosmetics.

4. Both owl: and rdfs: are pre-declared prefixes in the rdfa 1.1 'initial
context', and this addresses most of the cosmetic concern. New schemas
ought to be written in rdfa imho.

Dan



> Best,
> Yves
>
>
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