From: Peter F. Patel-Schneider ([email protected])
Date: 08/29/01
The situation may not be as bad as Frank makes it out. It would be possible for DAML+OIL to use rdfs:subClassOf as the main stated relationship between classes. This would be ``proper subclass''. The relationship that is inferred between classes, would not, however, be this relationship, instead being ``improper subclass''. I do not advocate this approach, however, as it would require significant changes to the ``natural'' way of expressing subclass relationships between defined classes. One would have to take care that the relationship between two defined classes was indeed ``proper subclass'' and that the two defined classes do not happen to be co-extensional. This would be particularly burdensome for DAML+OIL because of the distributed definition of classes in DAML+OIL, as additional information could cause two classes to be co-extensional. Because of this burden, I would expect that most subclass relationships would be expressed using ``improper subclass''. peter
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : 04/02/02 EST