Re: How do you deprecate URIs? Re: OWL-DL and linked data

Hi Bernard!

On 10 Jun 2008, Bernard Vatant wrote:

> All
> 
> Following my previous message mentioning lingvoj.org URIs, I had a 
> message from Earle Martin, early publisher of alternative URIs for 
> languages at downlode.org.
> Considering that lingvoj URIs are "better" than his own URIs (thanks), 
> he wants the downlode URIs to be flagged as deprecated and replaced by 
> the matching lingvoj URIs.
> On my side I want to keep track of those URIs at lingvoj.org, if only 
> for backward compatibility, and to acknowledge the pioneering work of 
> Earle in this domain. :-)
> 
> How should we do that?
>
> My first thought was to flag the downlode.org URIs with something like 
> owl:DeprecatedIndividual
> <http://downlode.org/rdf/iso-639/languages#da>    
> owl:DeprecatedIndividual    "True"
> ... but found out that such a property does not exist. OWL allows to 
> deprecate classes and properties, but not individuals :-( . Why so, I 
> don't know, since individuals are at least as versatile as classes and 
> properties, they are as likely to be deprecated.

The following information might still change, but the upcoming OWL 2
language will probably ship with the new annotation property

  owl:deprecated

which can be applied to any kind of entity (since it's an annotation
property!) in the form

  ex:y owl:deprecated "true"^^xsd:boolean

See

 
<http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/index.php?title=Syntax&oldid=8931#Annotatio
n_Properties>

  "An annotation with the owl:deprecated annotation property
"true"^^xsd:boolean 
  can be used to specify that an entity is deprecated."

Note that the cited document is a snapshot version of an internal OWL WG
draft, which is still work in progress at the time of writing.

> And, supposing such a property exists, the semantics of it would be 
> depreciation of the *entity*, not of the URI ... which means if I 
> declare something as the above alongside with
> <http://downlode.org/rdf/iso-639/languages#da>    owl:sameAs      
> <http://www.lingvoj.org/lang/da>
> I can infer that the lingvoj.org URI, or exactly the resource it 
> identifies, is also deprecated! Which is of course not at all the 
> intended semantics ...

OWL 2 DL won't define any (reasoning) semantics for annotation properties.
So owl:sameAs will *not* transfer the deprecation triple to the other URI.
(Again, this is the current state, which might change before OWL 2 DL
becomes a W3C recommendation.)

In OWL 2 Full, being an RDF compatible language, it is not possible to
define such a kind of "semantic-freeness". Here, owl:sameAs *will* transfer
the deprecation triple to the other URI.

> So ... I wonder. Any idea welcome ...
>
> Bernard

Best,
Michael

--
Dipl.-Inform. Michael Schneider
FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik Karlsruhe
Abtl. Information Process Engineering (IPE)
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