Re: AW: DBpedia 3.2 release, including DBpedia Ontology and RDF links to Freebase

<...trimming reply list...>

On 17 Nov 2008, at 23:31, Chris Bizer wrote:
>
> But what does this mean for WEB ontology languages?
>
> Looking at the current discussion, I feel reassured that if you want  
> to do
> WEB stuff, you should not move beyond RDFS, even aim lower and only  
> use a
> subset of RDFS (basically only rdf:type, rdfs:subClassOf and
> rdfs:subPropertyOf) plus owl:SameAs. Anything beyond this seems to  
> impose
> too tight restrictions, seems to be too complicated even for people  
> with
> fair Semantic Web knowledge, and seems to break immediately when  
> people
> start to set links between different schemata/ontologies.

Hmm. My sympathies are in this direction, having had unhappy  
experiences in the past (akt:Person was very restrictive, IIRC).  
However I don't think your conclusion is quite right.

Firstly sameAs has the nasty habit of infecting your data with  
somebody else's cruft. In a web context it seems more useful in  
conclusions than in premises. seeAlso inverse functional, and some of  
the things in OWL 2.

Secondly it's worth revisiting OWL's allValuesFrom, which gives you  
the benefit of rdfs:range (to describe data structure) but in a more  
limited way. For example it could allow the range of dc:contributor to  
be foaf:Person when used with foaf:Documents, but not infect other  
uses of the property.

Thirdly hasValue is pleasingly structural. Being able to determine  
types not because they have been stated, but because of the features  
of the data, has its virtues on the web.

Damian

Received on Tuesday, 18 November 2008 00:28:29 UTC