On 29 Sep 2008, at 00:51, Peter Ansell wrote:
That is fine for classes, but how do you map individuals without metadata side-effects?
The simple answer is "you can't", at least in general. The trick with equivalentClass (and property) is that it takes equivalence with respect to a particular facet of the individual: its 'class-ness'. See also OWL 2 punning (as far as I understand it), where you'd think about [X qua class] and [X qua individual]. For a generic individual we have no facets.
Now there's not necessarily a problem here. There are plenty of perfectly good uses for sameAs: foo:Tony_Blair owl:sameAs bar:Tony_Blair. But what about foo:Gordon_Brown owl:sameAs bar:PM_of_UK? foo:Geo_China owl:sameAs bar:PRC?
There's a huge literature about these issues, which ought to be warning enough that there's no simple solution. And a neutral term equivalentTo strikes me as virtually useless. So go for the easy patches, things like sameConceptAs and the frbr-ish sameWorkAs. They cover a lot of what we want to do. I could see sameGeoRegion having some utility in the future, and no doubt others can chip in more.
These are my Monday morning thoughts, so be warned. Damian
