Re: Moving forward

Pat,


> >I'm not sure what you mean by ``damage''.
> >
> >One way to go would be to
> >1/ ask for ``unasserted'' stuff in RDF
> >2/ place restrictions on the form of the DAML+OIL constructs
> >This *might* result in a viable solution, depending on how much of a
change
> >is made to RDF.  The change to DAML+OIL here would be
> >1/ the syntax
> >2/ the model theory
>
> I am confident that this will be a viable solution. Existing code
> does this, in effect, and seems to work reliably, and there is a
> clear strategy for providing a coherent semantics. I do not even
> think that it will require significant changes to DAML+OIL; the only
> extra requirement is that the daml:list triples be unasserted in RDF.
> It has some risks, the chief of which is that legacy RDF code which
> does not respect the 'unasserted' distinction might produce OWL
> inconsistencies. I think this is at worst an interim problem which
> will go away by itself, but we should consider it carefully.
>

-actually- current RDF code should interpret rdf:parseType="daml:collection"
as the same as rdf:parseType="Literal" and ought make no inferences about
the contents. This is the same as TimBL's use of "log:quote" to represent N3
contexts in RDF/XML.

My strong preference would be to treat whatever is in "daml:collection" as
unasserted, even when expanded into daml:List. This would have the
properties of:

1) treatment of the contents as an XML literal by current RDF parsers
2) introduce a (predicate . list) formula/sentence syntax

Perhaps the parseType should be changed to some other name e.g."ont:list",
"ont:formula" or "ont:sentence" to prevent the otherwise inevitable
conflation of this construct with an RDF collection.

Jonathan

Received on Monday, 18 March 2002 15:16:05 UTC