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Re: semantics in schema (xsd)

• To: XML Developers List <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: semantics in schema (xsd)
• From: David Megginson <dmeggin@a...>
• Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2004 09:12:16 -0500
• In-reply-to: <000701c3fd38$f3a6b2d0$0201a8c0@IRENE>
• References: <000701c3fd38$f3a6b2d0$0201a8c0@IRENE>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040122 Debian/1.6-1

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.

That's a lesson we've learned the hard way in the Object-Oriented 
programming world over the past decade or two.  Deep semantic subclassing is 
almost always a bad idea -- it makes programs hard to maintain and update, 
and I'll be that it does the same thing to RDF-based taxonomies.

As far as I've seen, most object-oriented programmers have moved from heavy 
subclassing to light subclassing with more aggregation.  I wonder what 
implications that has for how the Semantic Web people work.


All the best,


David

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