Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 15:36:09 +0200
Message-ID: <39E31B49.9DF61EB9@alcatel.be>
CC: Jeen Broekstra <jbroeks@cs.vu.nl>, www-rdf-interest@w3.org
Hello Jeen, I was not able to study your document right away due to lack of time. Anyway, I have started now :-). Reaching page 5, I already have some questions. Not really about OIL, but about the example material. I drew a picture showing the subclass of hierarchy (see attachment). Here are my questions: * Why would one like to state that plant is not a subclass of animal? Isn't it sufficient to leave out any relationship with animal? Then according to the model, these two are not related. I can see some sense in stating that plant is everything that is not an animal. But then, the modelling should not use 'subclassof' I guess. * Isn't the lion misplaced? * I have the feeling that carnivore and 'not carnivore' should be on the same 'level' in the hierarchy. However, 'not carnivore' is one hop away from herbivore and 'carnivore' is 2 hops away. This implies a difference in the hierarchy tree, or that 'not carnivore' has a higher abstraction level than 'carnivore'. Or am I seeing things the wrong way here? * When I say that class a is sublcassof b or subclassof c, what can I do with this information? Why would you want to model classes via an 'OR'? That's it for now :-). regards, Tom.
(image/jpeg attachment: animal.jpg)