Re: DAML and Dublin Core: incompatibility?

From: Dan Brickley (Daniel.Brickley@bristol.ac.uk)
Date: 03/03/01


On Sat, 3 Mar 2001, Ian Horrocks wrote:

> On March 2, Dan Connolly writes:
> > Dan Brickley wrote:
> > > This is a followup to some hallway and lunchtable conversations about
> > > DAML datatyping and the work of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.
> > >
> > > My understanding of the forthcoming revision of DAML+OIL+DT(*) is that
> > > we say all properties are either of the kind that point to resources, or
> > > of the kind that point to concrete datatypes, strings structured as per
> > > XML Schema part 2.
> > 
> > I don't think that's quite right; I'm not confident I know where
> > the latest draft is, but my understanding is: DAML+OIL+DT doesn't
> > say that all properties are either black or white; it just doesn't
> > tell you the semantics of the grey ones.
> 
> This is exactly the case: DAML+OIL+DT defines two subclasses of
> Property, AbstractProperty and DatatypeProperty.

So I can re-assure the DC folks that DAML processors won't be throwing
exceptions or refusing to load DC-based data structures because of this?

(context: this thread was occasioned by a lunchtable remark from TimBL
along lines that "I'm not sure DC will survive DAML"...).

An alternate strategy for the 'grey ones' is to wait for RDF-logic rules
machinery to annotate things like dc:creator with conclusions that can
be drawn in different contexts. So while the basic definition of
dc:creator is very loose and grey, additional claims made by DCMI might
say things like: when dc:creator points to a literal, it is the name of
an un-named resource of type dc2:Agent. While I'm not sure this is the
best route for DC, it makes sense given the history: we adopted this
loose modelling stratgy for DC because RDFS barely existed when DC
wanted to define a representation in the RDF model.

Dan


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