Re: [ANN] Working drafts by SW Best Practices group -- request for comments

While it is true that for some applications it may be useful to minimize 
the number of triples,
i do not think that should be an argument that is used to help choose a 
modeling scheme in a best practices working note.
I think we want to have modeling solutions that we believe represent 
good modeling choices that capture the representation and do not
introduce additional confusion or complication.

I am not clear that you could claim that this approach does not create 
additional maintenance either.

While it could be worth adding in the note that there are other ways to 
model this if for example you are interested in minimizing triples, I 
would not suggest that in a group note that we include this solution 
with what might appear to be equal endorsement.

deborah

Eric Jain wrote:

>
> Natasha Noy wrote:
>
>> Actually, I think it is more awkward. Having Simba both as an 
>> instance and a subclass of Animal is awkward at best. In some, very 
>> rare, circumstances, you could argue that that's what you want (in 
>> fact, I've done that myself [1]), but it complicates things 
>> significantly, and probably shouldn't be done unless you absolutely 
>> have to.
>
>
> It may complicate things from a theoretical point of view, but I would 
> argue that it solves the problem with a minimum amount of triples, and 
> without creating a maintenance problem or loosing expressive power.
>
> Looks like we are heading for a computer science versa software 
> engineering discussion :-)
>
>

-- 
 Deborah L. McGuinness 
 Associate Director Knowledge Systems Laboratory 
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 email: dlm@ksl.stanford.edu
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Received on Monday, 16 August 2004 16:15:37 UTC