Dear all,
On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 05:27:19PM +0000, Antoine Zimmermann wrote:
> Another slight problem of owl:equivalentProperty, though arguably
> minor, is that it is not part of the RDF/RDFS vocabulary. So, a pure
> RDFS reasoner or RDFS tool would simply ignore the two implicit
> rdfs:subPropertyOf. There is no reason to assume that all RDFS tool
> support the OWL vocabulary.
Antoine raises another point on which I would appreciate feedback
on DCMI's work.
DCMI Metadata Terms [e.g., 1] are currently defined entirely
using RDF and RDFS. Domains and ranges were assigned to most
DCMI properties in 2007, as discussed in [2], but every DCMI
property is still declared simply to be of type rdf:Property --
not of type owl:DatatypeProperty, owl:ObjectProperty, or
owl:InverseFunctionalProperty, etc, as in FOAF [3].
DCMI metadata terms started to be coined in 1995, two years
before RDF even began as a project, so much of DCMI's efforts
have been about evolving with the times. Though we have
certainly noticed the rising use of OWL for defining
vocabularies, nobody has ever proposed that we revisit DCMI's
RDF-based style for declaring terms. Indeed, Antoine's point
above makes me wonder whether there might in fact be good
reasons to continue along this current path - or, if we were to
start using OWL vocabulary, to preserve compatibility with RDFS
tools by using it only in addition to RDFS vocabulary.
I would be very interested to hear views from members of this
list on this question. As always, DCMI tries to promote
solutions that can straightforwardly be imitated by others,
so the general question is whether it is still good practice to
declare such a vocabulary using just RDF and RDFS, or whether
the use of OWL significantly enhances its usability, and if so,
in what ways.
I will be happy to pass any such views to DCMI lists but also
cordially invite anyone to engage the DCMI community directly on
these issues by posting to the dc-architecture mailing list
[4].
Best regards,
Tom
[1] http://triplr.org/ntriples/purl.org/dc/terms/
[2] http://dublincore.org/documents/2007/07/02/domain-range/
[3] http://triplr.org/ntriples/xmlns.com/foaf/spec/
[4] http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/dc-architecture.html
--
Thomas Baker <[log in to unmask]>
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