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Uche Ogbuji wrote: > > Also, I think that owl:sameIndividualAs might have been inspired by TM, since > the last time I remember discussion of standard assertion of the equivalence > of individuals, the key players were not keen on the idea. > Actually owl:sameIndividualAs was inspired by daml:equivalentTo... to make a long and over the top technical story short(er), the issue was that classic description logic formalisms make the distinction between classes and individuals whereas RDF does not. OWL Lite and OWL DL (for 'description logic') maintain this distinction, wheras OWL Full does not (classes can themselves be invididuals -- *sort of* like a higher order logic thingie). So from daml:equivalentTo we now have: owl:sameClassAs owl:sameIndividualAs owl:sameAs in certain cases there may be two classes that are the same, but they are not the same individuals. The reason to make this distinction is *entirely* based on the fact that there are existing and well characterized description logic reasoning engines where the unconstrained RDF is still somewhat experimental in the traditional logician's view (this is a gross simplification) OWL was inspired by a melding of the 'free wheeling' RDF ... anyone can say anything about anything ... with the highly constrained description logic view of the world. FWIW Jonathan
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