interpreting vague RDF, do we default to Literal?

In looking at existing applications/ontologies on the
web I'm finding that care is not being taken to be
specific.  This comes from the geonames ontology,
which I believe is one of the better rdf sources on
the net...

  <owl:DatatypeProperty rdf:about="#population">
    <rdfs:domain rdf:resource="#Feature"/>
    <rdfs:label xml:lang="en">population</rdfs:label>
  </owl:DatatypeProperty>

As a computer I know that population is a property of
Feature, that's it.  I don't know how many, what type,
etc.  

Is it common to just assume things as literals in the
absence of a range?  In this case you'd at least
expect population to be given a numeric range type.

Taylor





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Received on Thursday, 24 January 2008 12:53:14 UTC