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Remove owl:NamedIndividual for all resources #4

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xi-yang opened this issue Mar 23, 2016 · 0 comments
Open

Remove owl:NamedIndividual for all resources #4

xi-yang opened this issue Mar 23, 2016 · 0 comments

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@xi-yang
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xi-yang commented Mar 23, 2016

From John MacAuley:

In my limited work with OWL about 5 years ago I learned the distinction between class, declarations, and instance data.  OWL uses NamedIndividual as a class definition to identify an named instance of an object.  It allows the reasoning engine to determine the set of all instantiated objects, and from out perspective, allows us to query for all NamedIndividuals in an Ontology to get back all instance definitions within our model.  However, I never used this in any practical application.

With all our objects defined as a specific class there was no need to use NamedIndividual to identify an instance data.  When we do add both the specific class and NamedIndividual to an instance we add some confusion to the representation of the instance data.  For example, the following two statements are equivalent:

    <owl:NamedIndividual rdf:about="urn:ogf:network:stp:uvalight.ets:ps-80">
        <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://schemas.ogf.org/nml/2013/03/base#Port"/>
    </owl:NamedIndividual>

    <nml:Port rdf:about="urn:ogf:network:stp:uvalight.ets:ps-80">
        <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#NamedIndividual" />
    </nml:Port> 

I also believe the following RDF statement is equivalent as well:

    <rdf:Description rdf:about="urn:ogf:network:stp:uvalight.ets:ps-80">
        <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#NamedIndividual" />
        <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://schemas.ogf.org/nml/2013/03/base#Port"/>
    </rdf:Description>

Removing the use of NamedIndividual from the declaration means we only get the <nml:Port> version of the definition.  I think this might provide clarity.  Do you see anything we might break in OWL by removing it?
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