DL Syntax proposal B.1 and B.2

I'd like to understand a little more about the ramifications of B.1 and
B.2 as detailed in [1] and discussed briefly in the telecon last night.

As I understand it the proposal basically says that I can "reuse" bnodes
that correspond to concept descriptions if those descriptions are the
same. I assume here we're talking about them being *exactly* the same,
i.e. if I have:

 intersectionOf( A B )

and

 intersectionOf( B A )

then I wouldn't be able to do this anyway.

So what does it mean to me in implementation terms?

If I'm producing triples from some internal data structure corresponding
to abstract syntax constructions, then I can save myself a small amount of
work by only doing the triple generation once for each description and
then possibly reusing those elsewhere.

Conversely, when I'm trying to read a bunch of triples and determine the
OWL structure, B.1 and B.2 reduce the amount of work that I have to do so
see whether I've got valid OWL-DL, as I don't need to check that it's tree
like and that description bnodes aren't reused.

Is this a fair comment and/or am I missing some important subtleties?

   Sean

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2003Mar/0066.html

-- 
Sean Bechhofer
seanb@cs.man.ac.uk
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~seanb

Received on Friday, 14 March 2003 05:35:40 UTC