- From: Frank Manola <fmanola@acm.org>
- Date: Fri, 04 Nov 2011 11:11:08 -0400
- To: Markus Krötzsch <markus.kroetzsch@cs.ox.ac.uk>
- Cc: Semantic Web List <semantic-web@w3.org>
This is an excellent point. The best model for integrating database-style data (which is what I mostly think about) isn't necessarily the best model for other purposes, such as representing statements, since you're not necessarily going to be either thinking about or processing things the same way in the two cases. These are *designs* after all, and what they're going to be used for must be considered. On Nov 3, 2011, at 7:11 PM, Markus Krötzsch wrote: > On 03/11/11 19:19, Alexandre Riazanov wrote: >> I have been asking this sort of questions for a while and the only >> decent answer I know is that >> Description Logics only work with unary and binary predicates (classes >> and properties), >> although I believe RDF was initially developed independently from the DL >> and OWL work. > > It is true that DL (and thus OWL DL) is conceptually based on unary/binary relations but this was hardly the historical reason for RDF being defined this way in the first place. > > However, somewhat ironically, OWL ontologies are a good example of pieces of data that suffer a lot from forced triplification. OWL has a native (functional style) syntax that is quite easy to parse, whereas its RDF serialisation requires multiple passes over the data to group triples that belong to the same axioms (because the triples that form a single OWL statement can be distributed over a whole file, in random order). So one can actually say that OWL users, while preferring to model information in a *semantic* world of binary relations, are not very well served with a *syntax* that requires n-ary statements to be encoded in triples which do not allow have a reasonable meaning unless they can be re-assembled appropriately. > > (This is not an argument for or against OWL/RDF/triples/relations/etc. -- just an observation that some might find interesting.) > > Markus > > -- > Dr. Markus Krötzsch > Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford > Room 306, Parks Road, OX1 3QD Oxford, United Kingdom > +44 (0)1865 283529 http://korrekt.org/ >
Received on Friday, 4 November 2011 18:16:58 UTC