- From: Krzysztof Janowicz <janowicz@ucsb.edu>
- Date: Sun, 2 Feb 2014 15:50:46 -0800
- To: エリクソン トーレ <t-eriksson@so.taisho.co.jp>, "tim.glover@bt.com" <tim.glover@bt.com>
- CC: "semantic-web@w3.org" <semantic-web@w3.org>
>> A good explanation for software engineers might be that OWL does strong duck typing. >> Strong in the sense that the classes of an instance are defined by its properties. >> Then they can probably extrapolate any consequences of this and arrive at OWL logic. Duck typing typically refers to the fact that the methods and properties/variables of a given object determine its type. You can infer class membership in OWL as well as subclass relations but you can also explicitly declare them so this is where the analogy breaks. [And this all is not even mentioning OWA. I agree with Aidan here: There are, of course, common features but also many different features and, thus, one should not mix inheritance in OOM with the formal semantics of relations such as subClass and SubPropertyOf on the SW.] Best, Krzysztof On 02/02/2014 03:22 PM, エリクソン トーレ wrote: >> From: tim.glover@bt.com, February 01, 2014 1:21 AM >> As a software engineer, the striking difference is this. In Java, if a class >> A has property x, then all objects of that class have property x. If class >> B extends A, then all objects of class B also have property x. >> >> In OWL the logical direction is completely different. In OWL, if property >> x has domain A, that does NOT mean that all objects of class A have property >> x. It means that IF an object has property x, it must belong to class A (very >> roughly speaking - I am aiming for conceptual intuition of the difference >> here, rather than strict accuracy). IF B is a subclass of A, and IF I can >> deduce that object b is a B, then it must also be an A. > > A good explanation for software engineers might be that OWL does strong duck typing. > Strong in the sense that the classes of an instance are defined by its properties. > Then they can probably extrapolate any consequences of this and arrive at OWL logic. > > Tore > -- Krzysztof Janowicz Geography Department, University of California, Santa Barbara 5806 Ellison Hall, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4060 Email: jano@geog.ucsb.edu Webpage: http://geog.ucsb.edu/~jano/ Semantic Web Journal: http://www.semantic-web-journal.net
Received on Sunday, 2 February 2014 23:51:19 UTC