Re: Schism in the Semantic Web community.

On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 3:14 PM, Seaborne, Andy <andy.seaborne@hp.com> wrote:
> Alan,
>
> You quote:
>>
>> 2.1 Document Conformance
>> Several syntaxes have been defined for OWL 2 ontology documents, some
>> or all of which could be used by OWL 2 tools for exchanging documents.
>> However, conformant OWL 2 tools that take ontology documents as
>> input(s) must accept ontology documents using the RDF/XML
>> serialization [OWL 2 Mapping to RDF Graphs], and conformant OWL 2
>> tools that publish ontology documents must, if possible, be able to
>> publish them in the RDF/XML serialization if asked to do so (e.g., via
>> HTTP content negotiation). OWL 2 tools may also accept and/or publish
>> ontology documents using other serializations, for example the XML
>> Serialization [OWL 2 XML Syntax].
>
> Which says qualifies the "must" in "MUST, if possible, be able to ..."
>
> When is it not possible?  (follow-up Q if relevant: who decides?)

The "possible" refers to the cases where RDF/XML can't serialize RDF,
for instance in the cases that predicates whose URIs localnames begin
with a number. In those cases one can't construct a qname for the URI
and since predicates are always written as tags in RDF/XML this just
can't be serialized in RDF/XML.

So "possible" means possible in the absolute sense.

There was some discussion about whether we should restrict the names
in OWL ontologies so that such cases were ruled out but the general
consensus was that this was a problem with RDF/XML, not with RDF
proper and we shouldn't work around it in the OWL spec.

-Alan


>        Andy
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 28 January 2009 01:12:44 UTC