- From: Jeff Heflin <heflin@cse.lehigh.edu>
- Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2003 17:05:15 -0400
- To: WebOnt <www-webont-wg@w3.org>
I was looking through the reference today and I think the description of owl:sameAs in section 5.2 is misleading. It says: In OWL Full, where class can be treated as instances of (meta)classes, we can use the owl:sameAs construct to define class equality, thus indicating that two concepts have the same intensional meaning. (btw, note "where class can" should be "where classes can") I believe that in fact sameAs has an even stronger interpretation: that the classes are the same resource! (Peter, please correct me if I'm wrong here). Note the implications of this. If one class has some meta-property, such as author, label, last change date or whatever, then any class that is "sameAs" it also has the same values for those properties. Chances are, this is not what is usually intended. However, the reference implies this is the preferred way to map two class concepts that have the same intensional meaning. Unfortuantely, OWL doesn't really have a mechanism for truly stating that two classes have the same intensional meaning. That would require us to somehow separate meta-properties that are about a particular resource from those about the concept it denotes. Anyway, I think this issue should be explained and <footballTeam owl:equivalentClass us:soccerTeam /> should be the put forth as the preferred way for mapping these two classes. Jeff
Received on Friday, 25 April 2003 17:05:20 UTC