Cardinality restrictions (was: comparing DAML-ONT and OIL)

Thanks Peter, for doing a great job of comparing OIL-Standard and DAML-ONT!

(For those not in the know, OIL-Standard is a European funded proposal for a Semantic Web ontology language, also built on top of RDF(S), and was input to the desing of DAML-ONT. For more information, see http://www.ontoknowledge.org/oil/). 

One of the things that struck me in Peter's list of comparing OIL-Standard and DAML-ONT was:

>                                 OIL-Standard            DAML-1.2
>
>   Cardinality Restrictions      local (and global)      global only

This means that in DAML-ONT I cannot have a property "hasWheels" with a different cardinality restriction for bicycles and cars (since only one global cardinality restriction is allowed per slot). 

All other slot-restrictions in DAML-ONT are local (as they are in OIL).
Why has cardinality been handled differently?

Frank van Harmelen.
                 ----
Frank.van.Harmelen@cs.vu.nl              http://www.cs.vu.nl/~frankh
Department of AI, Faculty of Sciences,  Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
de Boelelaan 1081a, 1081HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
tel (+31)-20-444 7731 fax&voicemail (+31)-20-8722806

Received on Saturday, 14 October 2000 20:39:56 UTC