Re: ALL: philosophy of SWBPD (was Re: [OPEN] and/or [PORT] : a practical question)

Chris:
> Well, "mismodelling their world" is not limited to classes as instances. 
> I find it rather dangerous to make such statements.  People use subclass 
> incorrectly, too, but that wasn't a reason to remove that axiom from OWL 
> DL.  People just mismodel their worlds, I hope we can offer some advice 
> on both how to do some of these things and how NOT to do it.
> 



> See, it's this kind of converse that makes me nervous -- somehow the 
> idea that the people who prefer separating class from instance (as Ian 
> is quoted by Jeremy) are right and those who prefer to use metamodeling 
> (like Guus as quoted to WOWG. I don't have time to dig up the mail) are 
> somehow mismodeling.  This is nonsense -- 



I agree with both these points ... but that doesn't mean that any use of 
classes as instances is well-modelled, and at least in this specific case, 
remembering Ian's reservations, it seems to me that classes as instances is 
  misguided (when using dc:subject). I am well aware that many others in 
this group know much more about subject hierarchies and modelling than I 
do, but we shouldn't shy away from making judgements.

My concern was about the implied relationship between *dc:subject* and 
*rdf:type* both of which are already defined.
If, after thinking about it (which I haven't), I thought that metaclasses 
were an appropriate modelling tool for this case, I think I would need to 
use a new property instead of *dc:subject* in order to express its 
relationship to *rdf:type*.

On the 'philosophy of SWBPD' topic, I hope that Network Inference, and/or 
others coming from the DL camp will participate in this WG, since I think 
we will be less able to represent (and forge) the consensus of the 
community without input from that part of it. (Certainly I am an unlikely 
champion of that school of thought !)

Jeremy

Received on Thursday, 25 March 2004 03:28:27 UTC