<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><br></div><div>There is still an active debate on whether a Taxon (TaxonConcept) is a individual or a class (at least in my mind). From the OWL perspective it can't be both or it pushes us into OWL Full and possible undecideability.</div><div><br></div><div>Should we not do anything until we can settle this discussion (it is at the heart of modelling our domain) or should be simply agree that it may be modelled as either class or instance but that we still be defined it as existing?</div><div><br></div><div>I prefer the latter course. The 'correct' or optimal answer to the question depends on what the model if for and as that is incredibly vaguely specified it provides us with no grounds for testing proposed solutions. We could discuss till the cows come home and no one would ever be right or wrong and we would never have a way of ascertaining when we got to the end of the discuss. Life, after all, is short.</div><div><br></div><div>On the specific example that Bob mentions I wonder why we need the property at all. The notion of ownership is not restricted to biodiversity informatics. </div><div><br></div><div>dc:rightsHolder</div><div><a href="http://purl.org/dc/terms/rightsHolder">http://purl.org/dc/terms/rightsHolder</a></div><div>"A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource."</div><div><br></div><div>Would probably do the job and be understood by every application that 'understood' DC. Likewise a specimen is dc:isPartOf a collection (A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included.)</div><div><br></div><div>I am not aware of a way of suppressing assertions imported as part of an ontology. If I import TaxonConcepts that some one has helpfully tagged with dc:title assertions then they will be treated as instances by OWL not classes (classes aren't the subject or object of propeties only individuals are) unless I declare dc:title an OWL annotation property which will of course remove dc:title from all inference where it may be used elsewhere on real instances of things in my combined ontology. The only thing to do is to manually (or programmatically) remove all the offending triples on import. I'd like to know a better way of doing this.</div><div><br></div><div>But I should shut up as I am supposed to be on holiday.</div><div><br></div><div>All the best,</div><div><br></div><div>Roger</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div> </div><br><div><div>On 18 Oct 2009, at 15:38, Jonathan Rees wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div>On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 10:02 AM, Roger Hyam <<a href="mailto:rogerhyam@mac.com">rogerhyam@mac.com</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote type="cite">Hi Bob,<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">This is why I believe we should not make assertions in the core<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">ontology about range and domain of properties.<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">If some one wants to import these notions (terms) then they are forced<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">to also import our (possibly flawed) world view.<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">If we were to create a perfect model of the reality of the<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">biodiversity informatics domain in OWL (or XML Schema or UML or<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">alphabetti spaghetti) due to Hyam's unoriginal law* it would be wrong<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">next week or certainly by the next TDWG meeting.<br></blockquote><br>There is a different view, adopted by many ontology projects: You do<br>the best you can, and then if you find a mistake in the ontology, you<br>fix it.<br><br>Without guidance such as domain and range, you increase the<br>probability that curation will be inconsistent across projects. And<br>inconsistency makes data integration harder down the road, pushing<br>work that ought to be done once, at curation time, off onto hapless<br>consumers, each of whom has to do cleaning and normalization<br>separately.<br><br>The ontology is a significant point of leverage and it would be a<br>shame not to use it.<br><br>The OWL reasoners are really helpful at findings bugs like this one.<br>Public review helps too, as we have just seen.<br><br>If someone wants to ignore domain, range, subclass, etc. because<br>they're afraid they contain mistakes, that's pretty easy to do. If<br>someone wants to know how to use the ontology consistently with how<br>others are using it, that's hard to do, if the information they need<br>isn't in the ontology.<br><br>Jonathan Rees<br>Science Commons<br><br><blockquote type="cite">This is why we should perhaps have a list of terms (bound to URIs)<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">and a separate set of models that are used for particular occasions.<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Ultimately the semantics of the data is governed by the query that is<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">being asked i.e. it is context sensitive. "Give that XYZ, what are the<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">ABC?"<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">* Hyam's unoriginal law states "The future is different - that is how<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">we tell it isn't the present."<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Hope this helps,<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Roger<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">On 17 Oct 2009, at 22:45, Bob Morris wrote:<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><a href="http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/Collection.rdf#hasOwner">http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/Collection.rdf#hasOwner</a><br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">specifies two classes in its range: Person and Institution,<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">The formal semantics of rdfs:range entails that the actual range of<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">an object property is the intersection of the named rdfs:range<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">classes.<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">I believe this all entails that the only owner of a Collection is<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">something that is both a Person and an Institution.<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">Also, since these classes are not(?) defined as disjoint, the result<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">is that any set of triples<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"> Roger rdfs:type Person<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"> C hasOwner Roger<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">turns Roger into an Institution<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">Likewise<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"> Kew rdfs:type Institution<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"> C hasOwner Kew<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">turns Kew into a Person<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">I could be wrong about all this, perhaps unless I too am an<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">Institution, since, in my experience, Institutions rarely admit to<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">being wrong. (Uh, oh, better not go there... :-) )<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">Bob Morris<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">p.s.<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">This also suggests that the stylesheet human.xsl is somewhat<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">recalcitrant, since the html rendering of<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><a href="http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/Collection.rdf">http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/Collection.rdf</a> only sees Institution<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">as the range of hasOwner<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">--<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">Robert A. Morris<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">Professor of Computer Science (nominally retired)<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">UMASS-Boston<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">100 Morrissey Blvd<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">Boston, MA 02125-3390<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">Associate, Harvard University Herberia<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">email: <a href="mailto:ram@cs.umb.edu">ram@cs.umb.edu</a><br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">web: <a href="http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/">http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/</a><br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">web: <a href="http://etaxonomy.org/FilteredPush">http://etaxonomy.org/FilteredPush</a><br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><a href="http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram">http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram</a><br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">phone (+1)617 287 6466<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">_______________________________________________<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">tdwg-tag mailing list<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><a href="mailto:tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org">tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org</a><br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><a href="http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag">http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag</a><br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">_______________________________________________<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">tdwg-tag mailing list<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><a href="mailto:tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org">tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><a href="http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag">http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote>_______________________________________________<br>tdwg-tag mailing list<br><a href="mailto:tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org">tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org</a><br>http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag<br></div></blockquote></div><br></body></html>