Adam, Yes, there should be no issue with SHACL.
Having said this, I am yet to come across a situation where punning is the best or even the right approach. Typically, when one puns, they really mean to describe two different things that, in a natural language, are referred to using same term. Natural language is informal because when people use the same name to talk about two conceptually different things, they understand from the context what is being talkied about. For example, let’s consider cars and car models. I could decide Audi Q6 to be an instance of a class Car Model (or its subclass Audi Car Model). If so, this resource would have certain properties. Or I could decide it to be a class. In the later case, my intention would be for the instances of the class to be the actual cars that have VIN numbers, date of manufacturing, owners that drive them, etc. None of these properties are appropriate for the car model. Depending on what I am trying to express, while the resource name/label could be the same, the meaning would be quite different. Since these resources have different meaning and different properties, they should be separate. Similarly, one could talk about a flu as an instance of a disease and a flu as a set of all occurrences this disease - thus, a class or a set of things, but a set of conceptually different things. Flu as an instance of a disease has typically symptoms, commonly prescribed treatments, may be a person who first discovered it, etc. A flu that someone had let’s say a year ago is a member of the disease occurrences class. It has a start date, an end date, patient that had the disease, etc. These properties are appropriate for the members of the class disease occurrence, but not for the class disease. It was probably treated, but not necessarily using typically prescribed treatments. May be some of them, but definitely not all. There is a relationship between an instance of a disease and a class of decease occurrences (and between a car model and a class of cars), but they are not the same things. Barry Smith has hundreds of slides explaining the difference - not that I think hundreds of slides are necessary to communicate this. Of course, I do not know what your situation and needs are. Just thought I’ll share my perspective on this common modeling question. Regards, Irene. > On Sep 7, 2018, at 6:16 PM, Adam Kimball <[email protected]> wrote: > > I've run into a few different scenarios where I would like something to be > both a class and an instance. For me, this happens when I model something as > a skos:Concept because I want to refer to the abstract Thing but later have a > need to refer to individual Things. In the past, I have always been freaked > out by this problem so I've found ways around it that aren't very elegant. > But I'm working on a new project now where I might Stop Worrying About Owl, > and Learn to Love SHACL. > > I can't imagine why or how the concept of punning could cause problems in > SHACL but I think this list would have the people who could provide a > definitive answer. > > So, can I pun freely? > > -Adam > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "TopBraid Suite Users" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout > <https://groups.google.com/d/optout>. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TopBraid Suite Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
