Hi Bob,
This is why I believe we should not make assertions in the core ontology about range and domain of properties.
If some one wants to import these notions (terms) then they are forced to also import our (possibly flawed) world view.
If we were to create a perfect model of the reality of the biodiversity informatics domain in OWL (or XML Schema or UML or alphabetti spaghetti) due to Hyam's unoriginal law* it would be wrong next week or certainly by the next TDWG meeting.
This is why we should perhaps have a list of terms (bound to URIs) and a separate set of models that are used for particular occasions. Ultimately the semantics of the data is governed by the query that is being asked i.e. it is context sensitive. "Give that XYZ, what are the ABC?"
* Hyam's unoriginal law states "The future is different - that is how we tell it isn't the present."
Hope this helps,
Roger
On 17 Oct 2009, at 22:45, Bob Morris wrote:
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@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 _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag