Re: Deprecating owl:sameAs

On Fri, Apr 1, 2016, at 15:01, Sarven Capadisli wrote:
> There is overwhelming research [1, 2, 3] and I think it is evident at 
> this point that owl:sameAs is used inarticulately in the LOD cloud.
> 
> The research that I've done makes me conclude that we need to do a 
> massive sweep of the LOD cloud and adopt owl:sameSameButDifferent.
> 
> I think the terminology is human-friendly enough that there will be 
> minimal confusion down the line, but for the the pedants among us, we 
> can define it along the lines of:
> 
> 
> The built-in OWL property owl:sameSameButDifferent links things to 
> things. Such an owl:sameSameButDifferent statement indicates that two 
> URI references actually refer to the same thing but may be different 
> under some circumstances.
> 
> 
> Thoughts?

I fully agree that owl:sameAs is often used wrongly, however it is
currently *the* way to indicate that a resource has several names, so
unless you suggest to introduce a unique name assumption it's hard to
live without this property. 

A solution would be what I suggested on this list 9 years ago [1]: to
abolish named nodes.

So rather than expressing that a resource has two names with
<http://example.org/foo> owl:sameAs <http://example.org/bar> one would
have a node with two names, expressed as typed literals, e.g.:
[ owl:hasName "http://example.org/foo"^^xsd:IRI; owl:hasName
"http://example.org/bar"^^xsd:IRI].

The concrete syntaxes could still support using named node as they do
now, but it would just be syntactic sugar for the owl:hasName triple.
With such an approach there is no major change like introducing a unique
name assumption, owl:sameAs would be obsolete and for linked data more
appropriate properties like rdfs:seeAlso or skos:closeMatch, or
something else.

Cheers,
Reto


[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2007Aug/0239.html