Property example in "Self-describing web" draft

Re: http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/selfDescribingDocuments-2008-12-03.html
where it says:

'Indeed, RDF's Schema [RDFSchema] and OWL Ontology technologies [OWL]
together offer a standard, machine-processable means of describing
relationships between RDF statements, e.g. that two seemingly
differing predicates are the "owl:sameAs" each other.'

The reason to avoid going outside of OWL-DL (using sameAs on
non-individuals) is not to make any kind of endorsement of DL, but
simply because there is no reason not to use DL here, and it would be
less distracting if the question, which is irrelevant to this
presentation, simply had no way to come up.

The easiest fix is to use owl:equivalentProperty instead of owl:sameAs.

A better example might simply use a more useful, less distracting, and
less controversial relation, for example:

e.g. that one property is an "rdfs:subPropertyOf" another

I would change "predicate" to "property" to follow established RDF and
OWL usage. However I appreciate that "predicate" or "relationship"
might be a more intuitive term (in this context they're all roughly
synonymous), and I would defer to your editorial taste.

I have a hard time with "relationships between RDF statements".
Relationships hold between arbitrary resources, not (just) statements,
and I don't think you really mean relationships between statements
here.

How would the following example work for you?

'offer a standard, machine-processable means of describing
relationships that hold between resources, e.g. that the
foaf:publications relationship holds between persons and documents.'

Domain and range (what I've written informally as "holds between")
sound to me more like an ordinary description of a property than
rdfs:subPropertyOf or owl:equivalentProperty, both of which seem
comparatively exotic.

(You would want to spell out the full URI for foaf:publications
(http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/publications).)

Best
Jonathan

Received on Friday, 19 December 2008 13:58:59 UTC