Comments on "inheritance"

[kcoyle]

From the ShEx community:

We were unsure what to make of "inheritance", as we are not aware of any generalized notion of inheritance that would make sense across implementation technologies. It would be helpful to motivate this with a testable use case, e.g., a server implementation which responds to Accept-Profile by calculating the "best" response for processing a Profile Ontology description. A test of inheritance would include the notion that inheriting imposes further constraints, and that the entity being inherited from may in turn inherit from something else. ShEx shape inheritance has this behavior.

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-dxwg-comments/2019Feb/0001.html

[rob-metalinkage]

This is implicit in the definition, and the improved wording for the defintions and usage notes will help, but it needs to brought out more explicitly since the notion seems so hard to grasp - transitive inheritance via isProfileOf is the key machine readable axiom. This is to be addressed via #732

[kcoyle]

@rob-metalinkage You probably will need to explain what you mean by "transitive inheritance" as that may not be in everyone's vocabulary. We've also talked in many other issues about defining explicitly what inheritance means in terms of axioms. Nick did an example at one point, but if we expect it to be actionable then some precise algorithms are going to be needed.

[nicholascar]

"transitive inheritance" is now demonstrated in the PROF ED in examples and also in a long note after the prof:isTransitiveProfileOf property.

The axiom dct:conformsTo owl:propertyChainAxiom ( prof:isProfileOf dct:conformsTo ) also now present in the ontology defines the entailments that can be made with prof:isProfileOf and, since no equivalent axiom is declared for prof:isTransitiveProfileOf, it is clear how the usage of the properties differs.

Regarding the sentence:

It would be helpful to motivate this with a testable use case, e.g., a server implementation which responds to Accept-Profile by calculating the "best" response for processing a Profile Ontology description.

This is a matter for ConnegP and notes on "best" responses, or at least how responses from hierarchies are calculated, are given in the ED of that document.