RE: Annotation properties with range and other rdf:types

At 10:06 AM -0800 12/3/03, Holger Knublauch wrote:
>>  My opinion is that this is not necessarily a specification issue.
>>
>>  At the tool level you can certainly have a GUI in which
>>  annotations are declared and used as you have described, but
>>  IMO this does not require any modifications to the current spec.
>>
>>  For example, you can make use of another annotation property
>>  to denote the range for other Aps, Or use a "meta" ontology
>>  (an extension of the rdfs of owl) at the tool level.
>
>Yes, this would be a work-around.  But then I would have to
>introduce a new non-standard annotation property that other tools
>will not understand.  From my point of view, the allowed values
>of an annotation property are of general relevance, not only for
>editors but also to inform users of my ontology about the
>intended usage of the annotation properties I define.
>
>In addition, I think the OWL specification is already complicating
>enough: I don't see any reason why there should be a different
>mechanism for specifying annotation properties than for other
>properties.  This is not only confusing but also means an
>unnecessary implementation overhead.  Why don't we simply regard
>owl:AnnotationProperty similar to owl:FunctionalProperty, so that
>it can be attached as a "flag" to any other property?
>
>Regards,
>Holger

Holger, I must admit some confusion - if you know the types and 
properties of these things, why do you want to make them annotations? 
If you goal is to have metaclasses (I.e. classes with properties) you 
can certainly use OWL Full, it was designed to allow that.  If your 
goal is to refer to remote properties, you can still make local 
assertions about them.  Annotations were primarily added to handle 
some of the RDF(S) properties like label, seeAlso, and comment, which 
we wanted to allow, but did not want to try to classify on -- as Ian 
argued, if you know the info, put it in the ontology, if you don't, 
use an annotation but expect DL to ignore it
  So, in essence, you cannot have it both ways -- if you want to live 
in DL, you need to accept its restrictions.  If you don't want these 
restrictions, you should use OWL Full -- afraid that logic will not 
let us have our cake and eat it too (believe me, the WG tried hard to 
find a way to do that :->)
  For what you are suggesting doing, why can you not just use RDF 
comments, etc. or to define things directly in OWL?
   -Jim H

-- 
Professor James Hendler			  http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-277-3388 (Cell)

Received on Wednesday, 3 December 2003 14:02:22 UTC