Re: Property example in "Self-describing web" draft

Jonathan;

Going over Self-Describing Web notes in preparation for our publication 
decision this week, I came across the attached.  Did I drop the ball on 
this, were you going to propose text, or did we decide to let it go?  I'm 
sympathetic to doing the change in principle, but it's late if there's 
likely to be any controversy about the results.  What do you think is best 
to do at this point, and if it's to make any last minute changes, can you 
propose specific text?  I do apologize that, with this coming in right 
before the holidays, I seem to have missed it while going over my To Do's 
on SDW.

Noah

--------------------------------------
Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
--------------------------------------








"Jonathan Rees" <jar@creativecommons.org>
12/19/2008 08:58 AM
 
        To:     "noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com" <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
        cc:     "www-tag@w3.org WG" <www-tag@w3.org>
        Subject:        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 Tuesday, 20 January 2009 02:29:45 UTC