Re: equivalentTo

From: Dan Connolly (connolly@w3.org)
Date: 03/21/01


"Peter F. Patel-Schneider" wrote:
> 
> Hi:
> 
> As I was going through the reference document last night, I again
> encountered the issue of equivalentTo.
> 
> equivalentTo has been used to make two things the same.  However, there are
> several subrelationships of equivalentTo, including sameClassAs and
> samePropertyAs.  These two subrelationships then have no interesting extra
> meaning, as once two things are the same, they can't be made any samer.
> 
> So my suggestion is to do away with equivalentTo.
> 
> Comments?

I'm currently using equivalentTo for a number of things,
so it wouldn't be painless for me if we did away with it.

On the other hand, I haven't tried hard to live without it.

I don't think I have a compelling argument for keeping
it just now; this message is just a signal so that
you don't take silence from me as agreement that
we should remove it.

I suspect that JimH might be right when he says
that equivalentTo might be one of the most significant
contribution DAML makes to the Semantic Web
(in the 2000-10 thru 2001-03 drafts, anyway).
But I can't back that intuition up with heaps
of evidence yet.

The motivation for samePropertyAs and its ilk had
to do with helping out agents that only
knew RDFS 1.0; but there are a bunch of details
that I'm not sure we got quite right. I'd like
to do some hacking to check.

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
office: tel:+1-913-491-0501
pager: mailto:connolly.pager@w3.org
  (put return phone number in from/subject)


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