[tdwg-tag] Institutions are People if they own a Collection

Bob Morris morris.bob at gmail.com
Sat Oct 17 23:45:04 CEST 2009


http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/Collection.rdf#hasOwner
specifies two classes in its range: Person and Institution,

The formal semantics of rdfs:range entails that the actual range of
an object property is the intersection of the named rdfs:range
classes.

I believe this all entails that the only owner of a Collection is
something that is both a Person and an Institution.

Also, since these classes are not(?) defined as disjoint, the result
is that any set of triples
   Roger rdfs:type Person
   C hasOwner Roger
turns Roger into an Institution

Likewise
   Kew rdfs:type Institution
   C hasOwner Kew
turns Kew into a Person


I could be wrong about all this, perhaps unless I too am an
Institution, since, in my experience, Institutions rarely admit to
being wrong. (Uh, oh, better not go there... :-)  )


Bob Morris


p.s.
This also suggests that the stylesheet human.xsl is somewhat
recalcitrant, since the html rendering of
http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/Collection.rdf only sees Institution
as the range of hasOwner






-- 
Robert A. Morris
Professor of Computer Science (nominally retired)
UMASS-Boston
100 Morrissey Blvd
Boston, MA 02125-3390
Associate, Harvard University Herberia
email: ram at cs.umb.edu
web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/
web: http://etaxonomy.org/FilteredPush
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
phone (+1)617 287 6466



More information about the tdwg-tag mailing list