Re: DAMl "Thing" should be Top, Universal class - including concrete types

Dan Brickley wrote:
>
> On Thu, 1 Feb 2001, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
>
> >
> > > The proposal
> > > simply suggests a way to extend daml+oil with (a restricted form of)
> > > concrete domains while still retaining the above properties.
> >
> > However, it loses the ability to be a general unconstraining
> > langauge for unifying a very wide range of systems present and future.
> > This is the requirement of the semantic web
>
> hmmm... do we have a requirements document?
>
> Would it help to try to get buy-in on these broad (and broadly couched)
> 'requirements' before wading into the nitty gritty?
>
> You might for eg propose we take http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic
> (and nearby docs) as our requirements...

My understanding of this problem, and please correct me if this is in error,
is that there is a wish to encompass both rdfs:Resource and rdfs:Literal as
something to the effect of subClassOf daml:Thing. (Alternatively the current
problem in RDF(S) is that rdfs:Literal and rdfs:Resource do not share a
common subClassOf).

Why not simply define [rdfs:Literal rdfs:subClassOf rdfs:Resource]?

As has already been pointed out, every literal can be expressed as a URI of
the scheme "data:" so this small change in the RDF Schema Schema should work
and not negatively impact legacy RDF systems.

>
>
> > [...] We are making
> > a universal language which will allow the expression of information
> > from many difefrent systems. When a given system has limited descriptive
> > power, then its input and output will be limited to a subset of the
> > language.
>
> yup

    And better to have a unified top level construct between RDF and
DAML+OIL.

Jonathan Borden
The Open Healthcare Group
http://www.openhealth.org

Received on Thursday, 1 February 2001 13:05:57 UTC