Did you look at SPIN?
http://spinrdf.org/
That should allow you do do a lot with data without leaving the now
mainstream Semantic Web technology stack (as long as a small fragment of
OWL is sufficient for you).
Best
Martin
Axel Rauschmayer wrote:
I'm currently reading Hendler's brilliant book "Semantic Web for the
Working Ontologist". It really drove home the point that OWL is not a
good fit when using RDF for *data* (names are generally not unique,
open world assumption, ...).
But what is the alternative? For my applications, I have the following
requirements:
- Properties: transitivity, inverse, sub-properties.
- Resources, classes: equivalence. For my purposes, equivalence is a
way of implementing the topic merging in topic maps [1].
- Constraints for integrity checking.
- Schema declaration: partially overlaps with constraints, serves for
documentation and for providing default values for properties.
- Computed property values: for example, one property value being the
concatenation of two other property values etc.
The difficulty seems to me to find something universal that fulfills
these requirements and is still easy to understand. Inference, when
used for transitivity and equivalence, is simple, but when it comes to
editing RDF, they can confound the user: Why can some triples be
replaced, others not? Why do I have to replace the triples of a
different instance if I want to replace the triples in my instance?
While it's not necessarily easier to understand for end users, I've
always found Prolog easy to understand, where OWL is more of a challenge.
So what solutions are out there? I would prefer description logic
programming to OWL. Does Prolog-like backward-chaining make sense for
RDF? If so, how would it be combined with SPARQL; or would it replace
it? Or maybe something frame-based?
Am I making sense? I would appreciate any pointers, hints and insights.
Axel
[1] http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/index.html#desc-merging
--
--------------------------------------------------------------
martin hepp
e-business & web science research group
universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen
e-mail: [email protected]
phone: +49-(0)89-6004-4217
fax: +49-(0)89-6004-4620
www: http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group)
http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal)
skype: mfhepp
twitter: mfhepp
Check out GoodRelations for E-Commerce on the Web of Linked Data!
=================================================================
Webcast:
http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/webcast/
Recipe for Yahoo SearcMonkey:
http://tr.im/rAbN
Talk at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009:
"Semantic Web-based E-Commerce: The GoodRelations Ontology"
http://tinyurl.com/semtech-hepp
Overview article on Semantic Universe:
http://tinyurl.com/goodrelations-universe
Project page:
http://purl.org/goodrelations/
Resources for developers:
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations
Tutorial materials:
CEC'09 2009 Tutorial: The Web of Data for E-Commerce: A Hands-on Introduction to the GoodRelations Ontology, RDFa, and Yahoo! SearchMonkey
http://tr.im/grcec09
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