Re: property/class ambiguity in languages with no letter case

Hi Dan

Chinese is a good example indeed because not only there is not such a thing
as upper and lower case in Chinese (putting this language happily protected
from our occidental debates about freedom vs Freedom etc), and moreover
distinction between our grammatical categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives)
is not clear-cut as in English (or French). So, for the bits I know about
Chinese, it makes perfect sense to use 事件 as a label for both a class and a
property, the grammatical role being given by context of use. Native
speakers lurking here are welcome to correct me of course.

And certainly Chinese has less problems with that than English where naming
a predicate by a noun is always a shortcut with potential confusion about
the underlying implicit verb, if context provided by e.g., domain and range
are nor clarifying the affair. Workarounds using "is" "has" "of" etc. being
just that, workarounds of languages which centuries ago shot their feet
with too strict grammatical categorization. It might be that calling a
predicate and a class by the same noun is a good move back to the more
flexible approach of Chinese ...


2014-02-11 14:18 GMT+01:00 Dan Brickley <danbri@google.com>:

>
> On 11 Feb 2014 03:03, "Phil Archer" <phila@w3.org> wrote:
> >
> > On this occasion I really am trying to avoid getting into the debate
> about whether it is right or not to use an object property with a label
> that is the same as the class that is its range, differentiated only by the
> case of the first letter. That is an issue, and we prob should clear it up,
> but not today (and I suspect there is a lot of agreement on this).
> >
> > I'm just asking, do you agree or not that foo -> Foo *implies* 'has foo'
> -> Foo sufficiently strongly that a translation of the label into a
> language that does not have upper and lower case letters can indeed be 'has
> foo?'
>
> Good point re labels.
>
> Some examples where this doesn't work well:
>
> subClassOf -> hasSubClassOf
> alumniOf -> hasAlumniOf
>
> The 1st points to a broader type; the 2nd to an Educational org that
> someone is an alumni of.
>
> In both cases, prepending 'has' makes less sense and encourages the
> property to be misread backwards (until you read the last syllable and get
> confused).
>
> In general 'xyzOf' seems to me a 'last resort' when looking for property
> names. I wish we'd called rdfs:subClassOf "superClass" instead. But as you
> say that's another discussion.
>
> Some more potential examples -
> https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webschema/file/861b6fd28fcb/schema.org/translations/zhcn/schema_org_zhcn.html
>
> This is a first cut at schema.org labels in Chinese, thanks to Baidu,
> where lang of zh-cn is "Mainland China, simplified characters", and as I
> understand it, caseless.
>
> First, a class, 'Event':
>
>      <div typeof="rdfs:Class" resource="http://schema.org/Event">
>
>     <https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webschema/file/861b6fd28fcb/schema.org/translations/zhcn/schema_org_zhcn.html#l675>       <span class="h" property="rdfs:label">Event</span>
>
>     <https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webschema/file/861b6fd28fcb/schema.org/translations/zhcn/schema_org_zhcn.html#l676>       <span class="h" property="rdfs:label" xml:lang="zh-cn">事件</span>
>
>     <https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webschema/file/861b6fd28fcb/schema.org/translations/zhcn/schema_org_zhcn.html#l677>       <span property="rdfs:comment">An event happening at a certain time at a certain location.</span>
>
>     <https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webschema/file/861b6fd28fcb/schema.org/translations/zhcn/schema_org_zhcn.html#l678>       <span property="rdfs:comment" xml:lang="zh-cn">在某时某地发生的一件事</span>
>
>     <https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webschema/file/861b6fd28fcb/schema.org/translations/zhcn/schema_org_zhcn.html#l679>        <span>Subclass of: <a property="rdfs:subClassOf" href="http://schema.org/Thing">Thing</a></span>
>
>     <https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webschema/file/861b6fd28fcb/schema.org/translations/zhcn/schema_org_zhcn.html#l680>     </div>
>
> and a property, 'event', which seems to have an identical zh-cn label:
>
>   <https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webschema/file/861b6fd28fcb/schema.org/translations/zhcn/schema_org_zhcn.html#l6142>     <div typeof="rdf:Property" resource="http://schema.org/event">
>
>   <https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webschema/file/861b6fd28fcb/schema.org/translations/zhcn/schema_org_zhcn.html#l6143>       <span class="h" property="rdfs:label">event</span>
>
>   <https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webschema/file/861b6fd28fcb/schema.org/translations/zhcn/schema_org_zhcn.html#l6144>       <span class="h" property="rdfs:label" xml:lang="zh-cn">事件</span>
>
>   <https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webschema/file/861b6fd28fcb/schema.org/translations/zhcn/schema_org_zhcn.html#l6145>       <span property="rdfs:comment">Upcoming or past event associated with this place or organization.</span>
>
>   <https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webschema/file/861b6fd28fcb/schema.org/translations/zhcn/schema_org_zhcn.html#l6146>       <span property="rdfs:comment" xml:lang="zh-cn">即将发生的或已经发生的跟该地点或组织有关的事件</span>
>
>   <https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webschema/file/861b6fd28fcb/schema.org/translations/zhcn/schema_org_zhcn.html#l6147>       <span>Domain: <a property="http://schema.org/domain" href="http://schema.org/Organization">Organization</a></span>
>
>   <https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webschema/file/861b6fd28fcb/schema.org/translations/zhcn/schema_org_zhcn.html#l6148>       <span>Domain: <a property="http://schema.org/domain" href="http://schema.org/Place">Place</a></span>
>
>   <https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webschema/file/861b6fd28fcb/schema.org/translations/zhcn/schema_org_zhcn.html#l6149>       <span>Range: <a property="http://schema.org/range" href="http://schema.org/Event">Event</a></span>
>
>   <https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webschema/file/861b6fd28fcb/schema.org/translations/zhcn/schema_org_zhcn.html#l6150>     </div>
>
> Not sure these chars and markup will make it through email fully to
> everyone, but see webschemas mercurial repo at
> https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webschema/file/861b6fd28fcb/schema.org/translations/zhcn/schema_org_zhcn.htmlfor more examples.
>
>
> Dan
>
> > Phil.
> >
> >
> > On 11/02/2014 10:46, Jindřich Mynarz wrote:
> >>
> >> OK, I thought I must have misunderstood that. (However, you can argue
> that
> >> you can provide owl:equivalentProperty links between the translated
> URIs.)
> >>
> >> If translating rdfs:labels is indeed the case, then why not have 2
> >> vocabulary terms with the same label? Is it because it confuses
> vocabulary
> >> users and worsens usability of the vocabulary in question? What other
> >> concerns do you have on mind?
> >>
> >> - Jindřich
> >>
> >
> > --
> >
> >
> > Phil Archer
> > W3C Data Activity Lead
> > http://www.w3.org/2013/data/
> >
> > http://philarcher.org
> > +44 (0)7887 767755
> > @philarcher1
> >
>



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