Webont usecase - uniquestatic property

hi all,

I'm well aware it's rather late for this, but it came up on Monday in a
discussion with Misha Wolf of the W3C internationalization group. It
another usecase for issues brought up by Dan Brickley in this email:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2001Dec/0140.html
[[
dpo:UnambiguousProperty is of limited use for applications that need
to cope with a changing environment. We found a need for a property such
as wol:StaticUnambiguousProperty that guarantees to pick out an
indivdual
across time, given some property/value pair.

This is because we want to
distinguish two cases:

 - where there is AtMostOne entity with some given prop/value pair
   *at any given point in time*

 - where there is AtMostOne entity with some given prop/value pair
   *time invariant*

]]


this is the use case:

For language tagging countries have 2 and 3 letter codes. Countries can
choose any code that has not already been taken to represent themselves.
moreover after 5 years following a change, the code can be reused. A
similar case is when languages change over time, e.g. germany's recent
spelling changes, changes in the dutch language. this is an example of
the same reference potentially referring to different thing over time.

So, this is a case for something like daml unique property (or
cardinality as it appears in the RECDOC), but with a time index. the
code uniquely refers to Romania between the years of x and y; however,
outside those dates it may refer to a different languages. Misha himself
is thinking of writing an ontology for this subject.

I don't know how much this would impact on the Reqdoc, and apologise for
bringing it up so late, when I knew it was something important. What can
I do to make it up to you...?

Libby

Received on Thursday, 28 February 2002 11:39:34 UTC