Re: WOWG: agenda Aug 15 telecon

>Jim Hendler <hendler@cs.umd.edu> writes:
>
>>  To the best of my recollection, the discussion of the precise
>>  differences between daml:class and rdfs:class, which seems to carry
>>  over into our current decision-making and issues, was discussed in
>>  the DAML joint committee, and not really in this WG
>
>I think that we might have a related issue with the relation between
>rdfs:Resource and owl:Thing. Is rdfs:Resource a subclass of owl:Thing
>or vice versa, or are they the same?

I would suggest that

owl:Thing rdfs:SubClassOf rdfs:Resource.

In general, OWL can place more restrictions on its universe than RDFS 
can, so RDFS interpretations might well contain things that are 
OWL-impossible.

There is a general, rather deep, issue lurking here: different 
ontologies will be based on different notions of 'thing', so we will 
probably eventually need to reconsider the rather simplistic 
assumption underlying both DAML and OWL that there is a single 
monolithic universe which can be associated with the entire language. 
The inferential problem is that in my ontology (of People in the 
Arts, say), an existential claim might be false which is true in your 
ontology (of People Known to the FBI, say); and still, I have written 
my ontology with my notion of 'thing' in mind. If anyone uses facts 
from both ontologies, they can get unintended conclusions that aren't 
valid in either ontology in isolation.

Pat

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Received on Monday, 19 August 2002 12:24:27 UTC