Re: 5.20, need for synonyms

I find myself in vigorous agreement with Peter here.

I will add by two pennies worth about what are acceptable and 
unacceptable changes in meaning.

Jonathan Borden wrote:
 > If any concept/token/QName or URIreference is defined _in
 > any small or even trivial_ way differently for OWL than
 > RDF/RDFS, then this concept should be given a name in the
 > OWL namespace.

The RDF concept of meaning is:
- shown using a model theory that exhibits entailments
- intended to be monotonically augmented.

A change to RDF meaning is seen when the correct entailments of a file 
change.
A change in level (e.g. RDF to RDFS or RDFS to OWL, or RDF to datatyped 
RDF) is intended to add more entailments.
In the extreme case, all entailments of a document are added and that 
document becomes a contradiction.

Hence any change to the meaning that does not *stop* any rdf entailments 
is OK by RDF.

I have argued that we should try very hard to stick to this, even if we 
kludge it by restricting syntactically the scope of OWL.

I don't want synonyms.

Jeremy

Received on Friday, 26 July 2002 23:25:13 UTC