Re: DL and Lite namespaces?

From: Jim Hendler <hendler@cs.umd.edu>
Subject: DL and Lite namespaces?
Date: Sun, 16 Feb 2003 13:22:53 -0500

> 
> All - am behind on email trying to catch up with the many new threads 
> of the past few days.  One thing I noticed is various questions about 
> how users will know to do various declarations and things with 
> respect to annotations, literals, etc.
>   One idea we could use to make it easier on people would be to create 
> a namespace for Owl DL and/or OWL Lite.  

I am uncertain as to how this would simplify matters.

> These namespaces would 
> import the owl namespace

I do not believe that a namespace can import another namespace.

>  and would contain some of the extra 
> declarations and things that would make it easier for users to use 
> common constructs like rdfs:comments and etc. without needing to know 
> all the details of declarations to get started.  This would be 
> particularly helpful for the exchange documents in rdf/xml form.

Well, how much startup is there to use rdfs:comment?  At worst, an
indication that rdfs:comment is an OWL annotation property is required.
However, as rdfs:comment is built-in to OWL in some sense, I believe that
this declaration should not need to be part of an OWL ontology and have
tried to arrange OWL accordingly.

>   Any reason this wouldn't work?  Any reason to object to it?

You mean aside from the issue mentioned above?

>   -JH

> p.s. I suspect by having an OwlDL.owl namespace, we would be able to 
> do some things we cannot do in owl.owl, but which would make DL 
> documents more terse since they wouldn't each need to include a 
> number of declarations and etc.

I've tried to figure out what you are asking for here and haven't been able
to succeed.  

Are you asking for a new namespace so that, for example, an OWL Lite ontology
could use owll:class instead of owl:class?  How would this make life any
easier? 

Are you asking for an ontology that imports other ontologies?  If it does
this to mess with the OWL and RDF(S) vocabulary then it would be in OWL Full.

Are you asking for simpler OWL ontologies when written in XML/RDF?  This is
like asking whether it is better to be hit on the head by a lead brick or a
steel brick when there is the possibility of instead being caressed by a
feather.

Peter F. Patel-Schneider
Bell Labs Research
Lucent Technologies

Received on Sunday, 16 February 2003 13:50:26 UTC