Re: Domain and range are useful Re: DBpedia 3.2 release, including DBpedia Ontology and RDF links to Freebase

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 4:02 AM, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org> wrote:

>
> On 2008-11 -17, at 11:27, John Goodwin wrote:
>
> [...]
> I'd be tempted to generalise or just remove the domain/range
> restrictions. Any thoughts?
>
>
> There are lots of uses for rand and domain.
> One is in the user interface -- if you for example link a a person and a
> document, the system
> can prompt you for a relationship which will include "is author of" and
> "made" but won't include foaf:knows or is issue of.
>
> Similarly, when making a friend, one can us autocompletion on labels which
> the current session knows about and simplify it by for example removing all
> documents from a list of candidate foaf:knows friends.
>

Both these use cases require some OWL to say that documents aren't people. I
don't see these scenarios being feasible in the general case because you'd
need a complete description of the world in OWL, i.e. you'd want to know
about everything that can't possibly be a person.



>
> It is of course also important for checking hand-written files for
> validity.
>

Again, isn't validity checking something that can only be done with OWL.
RDFS only adds for information.



>
> Tim BL
>

Ian