Re: possible semantic bugs concerning domain and range

From: pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
Subject: possible semantic bugs concerning domain and range
Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2002 23:21:42 -0500

> Ah, it occurs to me that one of the bugs that Peter may have been 
> referring to is my use of rdfs:range and rdfs:domain.  Peter 
> apparently believes that the RDFS semantics for these are wrong and 
> need correcting. 

I don't believe that the semantics for these are wrong as far as RDFS is
concerned.  (However, the semantics for rdfs:subClassOf and
rdfs:subPropertyOf *are* wrong in the RDF MT.)

> However, I disagree, and do not propose to alter 
> them in the RDFS MT. If OWL needs to use different notions then OWL 
> should introduce and use owl:domain and owl:range rather than use the 
> RDFS vocabulary. 

In the RDF philosophy of being able to say anything about anything, why
can't OWL say that, as far as *OWL* is concerned, rdfs:range and rdfs:domain
have iff definitions?

> I would however suggest that the adoption of a 
> different mechanism at such a basic level might be a decision which 
> should be examined very carefully, as it has many repercussions (eg 
> for datatyping mechanisms). I havn't seen any good arguments for it, 
> which is why I simply used the RDFS notions in the document.

As far as OWL is concerned, 

	foo rdfs:range bar .

should follow from

	foo rdfs:range baz . 
	baz rdfs:subClassOf bar .

This would fit in with the general OWL stance on these sorts of things.

peter

Received on Monday, 23 September 2002 09:51:24 UTC