RDF/S entailment rules.

I have a kind of editorial progress report to give. Or maybe lack of progress.

The 2004 Semantics document included a long section describing sets of entailment rules for various entailment regimes, with completeness theorems plus proofs, which I suspect only two people ever read. The rules for RDFS were actually incomplete, and the proofs were wrong. None of this was normative and none of it was needed to expalin the actual semantics. During our WG discussions I suggested simply removing it from the document, but this idea met with some pushback from members who felt that these rules had been the most accessible way for some readers to understand the semantics. One idea that was suggested was to make the rules section into a separate document. 

I have been drafting this separate document, until I realized that it has already been written, by Herman ter Horst. Herman analyzed the rules in the 2004 document, found the subtle errors in them, invented an elegant improvement of them which has been fully described in a series of published papers, and even implemented in a publicly available Python app. He also proved completeness and established some decision and complexity results. Anything I write will be little more than a direct copy of his work, with footnotes. 

I think the only sensible thing is to refer to this published work, and invite interested readers to check it out and make the small adaptations that might be necessary to handle the small changes in the semantics since 2004. Anyone who is interested enough to actually implement this stuff will be able to do this. 

Comments?

Pat

Herman's papers:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570826805000144
http://www.extra.research.philips.com/hera/people/terhorst/ISWC2005p668.pdf

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Received on Sunday, 5 May 2013 15:11:03 UTC