SEM: Classes as instances

I said I would try and share an idea.

What I think I have heard people say is:

RDFS semantics work OK because it doesn't have any of the complicated bits 
like restrictions and cardinalities.

DL semantics work OK because they have a clear two level system, with classes, 
properties, instances and data values as all conceptually distinct.

Put them together and you get a mess.

As far as I can tell, most of the "classes as instances" use cases are 
addressed by RDFS.

Thus, could we conceptually do something like the following:

1: apply RDFS completely (with cycles etc)
2: then take a DL view of the result

and not do both together, avoiding some of the pitfalls that Ian worries 
about.

I can see that at some level I am just proposing a scruffy hack, but it seems 
we have two well defined and well understood processes that we are nervous 
about combining together in an unconstrained way. So how about combining them 
in the above constrained way?
(I think I hear much of the group having digestive problems ....)

Jeremy

Received on Friday, 6 September 2002 16:36:36 UTC