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RE: semantics in schema (xsd)

• To: "'Liam Quin'" <liam@w...>,<xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: semantics in schema (xsd)
• From: "Irene Polikoff" <Irene@t...>
• Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2004 10:50:02 -0500
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <20040227144553.GU27421@w...>

>From the prospective of these two software languages (RDF and OWL) this
is not an issue at all. Social implications, acceptability and
legislature are another topics altogether :)

What I suggested before was to say that:

Males may have wifes and wifes are females

Kind of like this:

<owl:ObjectProperty rdf:ID="wife">
  	<rdfs:domain>   rdf:resource="#Male" />
	<rdfs:range>   rdf:resource="#Female" />
</owl:ObjectProperty>

Similarly, females may have husbands and husbands are males

<owl:ObjectProperty rdf:ID="husband">
  	<rdfs:domain>   rdf:resource="#Female" />
	<rdfs:range>   rdf:resource="#Male" />
</owl:ObjectProperty>


Here Male and Female are classes. Wife and Husband are relationships
between them.

What you are bringing up is that in some countries a husband may be also
a male. One way to handle it is to create a subclass of homosexual males
and declare that homosexual males may also have husbands. In addition,
one could put a restriction saying that this is only possible in a
certain subclass of countries (countries that allow homosexual
marriages).

This is, however, going quite beyond the scope of the original example. 

Regards,

Irene

-----Original Message-----
From: Liam Quin [mailto:liam@w...] 
Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 9:46 AM
To: xml-dev@l...
Subject: Re:  semantics in schema (xsd)


On Fri, Feb 27, 2004 at 08:52:31AM -0500, Irene Polikoff wrote:
> Yes, modeling wife as a subclass of female may not be the right thing 
> to do. Another option in either RDF or OWL is for wife or husband to 
> be modeled as a property of male/female. It could then be said (using,

> for example, domain - range restrictions of RDF) that wife's must be 
> females and husband's must be males.

But I am male, and my husband (yes, legally here in Canada) is male.

When you try to enshrine legislation in software, you have to be willing
to make changes ;-)

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/

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