https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59680

--- Comment #7 from Emw <[email protected]> ---
I think it would help to have this request reviewed by someone with detailed
knowledge of the RDFS and OWL W3C specifications.  Markus Krötzsch might be
willing.

I am concerned about Example C from the original request.  It sets making
subproperties of P31 (instance of) a motivation for this property.  P31 has the
semantics of rdf:type per community consensus.  It is also in the RDF export as
such: see wikidata-instances.nt.gz in
http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-exports/rdf/exports/20140526/.  That export
uses OWL.  Of the OWL varieties, OWL 2 DL tends to be preferred.

However, according to the OWL 2 Structural Specification, section 5.3, "IRIs
from the reserved vocabulary other than owl:topObjectProperty and
owl:bottomObjectProperty MUST NOT be used to identify object properties in an
OWL 2 DL ontology." [1]  The specification goes on to explain that IRIs
prefixed with rdf and rdfs, e.g. rdf:type and rdfs:subClassOf, are among the
reserved vocabulary.  A 2007 paper by Boris Motik, an editor of OWL 2, explains
why making statements about the built-in vocabulary is such a problem.  

Simply put, statements like "x rdfs:subPropertyOf rdf:type" and "y
rdfs:subPropertyOf rdfs:subClassOf" would not be valid in OWL 2 DL, the
preferred W3C language for Semantic Web ontologies.

Subproperties would be very useful, but enabling non-standard semantics would
outweigh that benefit.

1. http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-syntax/#Object_Properties
2. http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/Boris.Motik/pubs/motik07metamodeling-journal.pdf

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