Re: ISSUE-135: Last Call Comment: rdfs:label

Dear Michael

Thank you for your comments [1,ISSUE-135]:

> What is the rational for making SKOS labeling properties sub properties of
> rdfs:label (besides the common name)? Note that rdfs:Label is an
> owl:AnnotationProperty in OWL. While in OWL Full, annotation properties can have
> sub properties, it looks at least a little odd (though formally fine) to have a
> data property be a sub property of an annotation property. If no strong reasons
> talk against, I suggest to /not/ have sub properties of rdfs:label.

As you point out, the assertion does violate OWL DL constraints,
although I'm sure you are aware that this is not the only OWL DL
constraint that is violated by the current SKOS vocabulary.

In this particular case, a number of existing implementations (for
example linked data browsers) make use of rdfs:label in order to
render resources.  Including the subproperty relation makes the SKOS
lexical labels available to such applications without any additional
machinery beyond the RDF(S) semantics.

Your question suggests an alternate approach to this issue, however.
In the current schema, these are asserted to be instances of
owl:DatatypeProperty. On reflection, we feel that it is more
appropriate to type these as owl:AnnotationProperty (and retain the
subproperty relationship.  Although this will still violate an OWL DL
constriant (no subproperty relationships are allowed on annotation
properties), it is likely that changes in OWL 2 will allow
relationships between annotation properties. It may then be possible
to represent SKOS in terms which conform to OWL 2 with minimal
changes.

The Working Group thus propose to change the type of the SKOS
labelling properties to owl:AnnotationProperty, and *postpone* this
issue (indicating that it may merit further consideration in the
future). Can you live with this?

Kind regards,

	Sean Bechhofer
	Alistair Miles

[ISSUE-135] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/track/issues/135
[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/2008Sep/0044.html

-- 
Alistair Miles
Senior Computing Officer
Image Bioinformatics Research Group
Department of Zoology
The Tinbergen Building
University of Oxford
South Parks Road
Oxford
OX1 3PS
United Kingdom
Web: http://purl.org/net/aliman
Email: alistair.miles@zoo.ox.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1865 281993

Received on Tuesday, 2 December 2008 09:26:40 UTC