[rdfweb-dev] Describing FOAF using OWL: enumerating allowed

[Danny Ayers]

Does any mailing list have writing OWL ontologies in scope? I'm subscribed
to most (maybe all) of the related W3C lists, but nowhere does this seem to
really come up - rdf-interest I suppose is the closest. Maybe people only do
it in the privacy of their own homes ;-)

I wonder if I can just slip these in, pick your brains on a couple of
related collections-related scenarios. I'm wondering how best to represent
the info in RDF/OWL.

1. open collection becomes closed collection

This has come up with my simple-project-management vocab [1], where a task
or goal is comprised of subtasks/goals. I'm currently modelling this with
TaskList & GoalList typed-node style container classes (bunch of rdf:li's),
so it's open ended. But at some point in the project development process you
will/should know that you have enumerated all the subtasks/goals. For
reasoning about priorities, it would be useful to be able to say that a
particular goal has exactly these subgoals.

2. closed collection dependent on open collection

>From the ThreadsML strawman [2]. A thread is a set of related posts (mail,
blog, whatever), each will be identified with a URI. Now it won't be
possible to conclusively say that a, b and c are the only posts in a thread,
because d could be out there and simply not yet discovered. So the posts
list will be open-ended. But the list of contributors to the thread will be
fixed 'internally', dependendent on the list of posts.

Hmm, two things occurred to me while typing that last sentence - one that it
might be best to have a closed collection of 'known posts', that could be
revised as new posts appear. Secondly, as it's using foaf for all the
person-related stuff this list probably is an appropriate place to discuss
it after all ;-)

Anyhow, thought & suggestions greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] http://ideagraph.net/xmlns/project/
[2] http://www.quicktopic.com/cgi-bin/thwiki.pl?ThreadsVocabulary