a proposal for defining OWL DL documents (was Re: OWL, XML-RDF and Imports)

Continuing along with Sean's reasoning, I propose that the definition of
an OWL DL document, i.e., an RDF/XML document that is an OWL DL ontology,
be modified to be:



DEFINITION:  An RDF/XML document is an OWL DL ontology if 

1/ the RDF graph resulting from parsing it as an RDF/XML document forms the
   translation of a single OWL ontology in the abstract syntax;

2/ all RDF/XML documents that it imports are also in OWL DL ontology form;

   and

3/ the imports closure of the document 

   a/ does not use any URI reference as more than one of an ontology name,
      a classID, a datatypeID, an individualID, a datavaluedPropertyID, an
      individualvaluedPropertyID, or an annotationPropertyID; and

   b/ does not use any of the URI references from the RDF, RDFS, or OWL
      namespaces that are mentioned in the RDF or OWL semantics except for
      the OWL datatypes, the OWL built-in classes, and the OWL built-in
      annotation properties.



Imports closure is defined as finding all the directly and indirectly
imported documents and then forming the merge of their RDF graphs along
with the RDF graph of the document itself.

The definition for Lite is similar.



This would go along with a version of the translation rules that required
rdf:type triples for classes, datatypes, datatype properties, object
properties, and annotation properties, but not for ontologies or
individuals.



Peter F. Patel-Schneider
Bell Labs Research
Lucent Technologies

Received on Sunday, 16 February 2003 09:54:31 UTC