On Fri, Apr 1, 2016, at 15:01, Sarven Capadisli wrote: > There is overwhelming research [1, 2, 3] and I think it is evident at > this point that owl:sameAs is used inarticulately in the LOD cloud. > > The research that I've done makes me conclude that we need to do a > massive sweep of the LOD cloud and adopt owl:sameSameButDifferent. > > I think the terminology is human-friendly enough that there will be > minimal confusion down the line, but for the the pedants among us, we > can define it along the lines of: > > > The built-in OWL property owl:sameSameButDifferent links things to > things. Such an owl:sameSameButDifferent statement indicates that two > URI references actually refer to the same thing but may be different > under some circumstances. > > > Thoughts?
I fully agree that owl:sameAs is often used wrongly, however it is currently *the* way to indicate that a resource has several names, so unless you suggest to introduce a unique name assumption it's hard to live without this property. A solution would be what I suggested on this list 9 years ago [1]: to abolish named nodes. So rather than expressing that a resource has two names with <http://example.org/foo> owl:sameAs <http://example.org/bar> one would have a node with two names, expressed as typed literals, e.g.: [ owl:hasName "http://example.org/foo"^^xsd:IRI; owl:hasName "http://example.org/bar"^^xsd:IRI]. The concrete syntaxes could still support using named node as they do now, but it would just be syntactic sugar for the owl:hasName triple. With such an approach there is no major change like introducing a unique name assumption, owl:sameAs would be obsolete and for linked data more appropriate properties like rdfs:seeAlso or skos:closeMatch, or something else. Cheers, Reto [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2007Aug/0239.html
