Re: Does rdfs:superClassOf (or equivalent) exist?

As does json-ld and rdfa, fwiw

And ntriples is ugly enough you can just flip around the statement without
it looking very different

We live in an era of talking computers, this doesn’t strike me as a great
issue of our time!

On Mon, 30 Oct 2023 at 18:23, David Booth <david@dbooth.org> wrote:

> Note that N3 provides a convenient syntax for reversing the direction of
> a predicate, so you don't have to define its inverse.  From the N3
> documentation:
> https://www.w3.org/TeamSubmission/n3/#shorthand
>
> [[
> Paths
>
> These are just shorthand. x!p means [ is p of x ] in the above anonymous
> node notation. You can read it as "x's p". This is a little reminiscent
> of the "." in object oriented programming "object.slot" syntax.
>
> The reverse traversal, x^p means [ p x ] . For either forward or
> backward traversal, p is a property, and x can be a whole path with both
> ! and ^ in it.
>
> Example:
>
> :joe!fam:mother!loc:office!loc:zip Joe's mother's office's zipcode
>
> :joe!fam:mother^fam:mother Anyone whose mother is Joe's mother.
> ]]
>
> Thanks,
> David Booth
>
> On 10/30/23 12:52, Miguel wrote:
> > Hi Harshvardhan,
> > just to further elaborate, with that argument you could support the
> > explicit definition of the inverse of any object property (excluding
> > symmetric properties).
> > Some vocabularies do indeed adopt that convention.
> >
> > The problem with that is that at the syntactic level you have always two
> > ways (for each pair of related resources) to represent the same meaning.
> > Only if you explicitly state in OWL the relationship between the two
> > properties with the inverseOf expression *and* perform inference, then
> > the two versions are reconciled.
> >
> > Furthermore, the direction in which a property is defined does not (at
> > least in theory) imply a specific favoured direction for traversing it,
> > as shown in the SPARQL examples by Antoine Zimmermann.
> >
> > Best regards,
> > Miguel
> >
> > On Mon, Oct 30, 2023 at 5:47 PM Antoine Zimmermann
> > <antoine.zimmermann@emse.fr <mailto:antoine.zimmermann@emse.fr>> wrote:
> >
> >     rdfs:superClassOf (respectively rdfs:superPropertyOf) does not exist
> in
> >     any standard, nor any term equivalent to it.
> >
> >     If it did, it would not add anything to reasoning or querying. If you
> >     want to list all subclasses of a class <C>, you can write:
> >
> >        SELECT ?subclass WHERE {
> >          ?subclass  rdfs:subClassOf  <C> .
> >        }
> >
> >     and if you want the list of superclasses of a class <C>, you write:
> >
> >        SELECT ?superclass WHERE {
> >          <C>  rdfs:subClassOf  ?superclass .
> >        }
> >
> >
> >     What use cases would make it harder and more painful to write:
> >
> >        :A  rdfs:subClassOf  :B
> >
> >     than:
> >
> >        :B  rdfs:superClassOf  :A
> >
> >     ?
> >
> >
> >     --AZ
> >
> >     Le 28/10/2023 à 14:21, Harshvardhan J. Pandit a écrit :
> >      > Hi.
> >      > We have rdfs:subClassOf defined in a standardised specification
> >     (RDFS).
> >      > RDFS several times mentions 'superclass', but AFAIK there is no
> >     property
> >      > or relation to make this explicit, i.e.
> >      >
> >      > ```turtle
> >      > :A rdfs:subClassOf :B . # exists
> >      > :B rdfs:superClassOf :A . # does this exist anywhere?
> >      > ```
> >      >
> >      > I can intuit why subclass relations are the most common and
> >     preferred
> >      > methods of use - because anyone can extend the superclass from
> >     anywhere.
> >      > And that either assertion can be inferred from the other (sub to
> >     super,
> >      > vice-versa), but I also think having the superclass be 'aware' of
> >      > subclasses is a good practice in maintaining ontologies e.g. to
> >     get a
> >      > list of all subclasses which would normally require a query each
> >     time.
> >      >
> >      > (Likewise for rdfs:subPropertyOf and rdfs:superPropertyOf)
> >      >
> >      > Apologies in advance if this has already been answered somewhere
> (I
> >      > would appreciate it if you point me to it).
> >      >
> >      > Regards,
> >
> >     --
> >     Antoine Zimmermann
> >     École des Mines de Saint-Étienne
> >     158 cours Fauriel
> >     CS 62362
> >     42023 Saint-Étienne Cedex 2
> >     France
> >     Tél:+33(0)4 77 49 97 02
> >     http://www.emse.fr/~zimmermann/ <http://www.emse.fr/~zimmermann/>
> >
>
>