Class warfare: rdfs: vs. daml:

From: Pat Hayes (phayes@ai.uwf.edu)
Date: 11/05/01


I noticed on rdf-logic recently some remarks concerning the fact that 
DAML-S uses rdfs:Class and rdfs:Property rather than the 
daml:-prefixed versions, and how this is both troublesome, and going 
to be corrected in future versions of DAML-S.

However, I would like to suggest a rather more radical solution, 
which is that we should simply declare that (in DAML+OIL), daml:Class 
and daml:Property are equivalent to  rdfs:Class and rdfs:Property, so 
that a conforming engine is required to treat them synonymously. As 
far as I can see, there is no model-theoretic reason not do this, and 
since the pragmatic benefits of a tighter integration seem obvious, 
why do we maintain this rather snooty stance of insisting that *our* 
classes are somehow different from *their* classes ? Of course, you 
can say more about them in DAML+OIL than you can in RDFS, but they 
are still the same *things*. As Robert Burns might have said: a set's 
a set, for a'that.

Pat Hayes

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