2013-02-08

Ontology Loose Coupling Annotation

I've slowly changed my mind since last year about schema.org semantics. The RDFa version of the data model, even if it was still "experimental", has clarified that schema.org notions of "domain" and "range" differ from their RDFS homonyms. I was pleased to see later on the proposal to rename them "domainIncludes" and "rangeIncudes" respectively to avoid further ambiguity, even if this proposal did not address all my questions.
And actually I now look forward to see those properties explicitly published and usable for linked vocabularies, because they offer a new way to link class to properties, alternative to the hard semantic constraints of either rdfs:domain and rdfs:range (often abused because default such alternative), or local constraints using OWL restrictions, more difficult to understand and use. The semantics of domainIncludes and rangeIncludes are indeed more fit to the needs of  loose semantic coupling in the linked data universe. They allow to suggest, indicate without enforcing any logical constraint, the classes that are expected or intended to be found for subjects and objects of a given predicate. They offers good guidelines to linked data publishers and consumers using the predicate. They are a nice workaround avoiding the cumbersome construction of complex domains using owl:unionOf.
Since the publication of those properties in the schema.org namespace does not seem in the top priorities, I decided to make a step forward and define them in a namespace of mine, and to use them in the latest version of the lingvoj.org ontology. This small vocabulary is (so far) called Ontology Loose Coupling Annotation. Not sure this is the most appealing title, maybe Loose Ontology Coupling (LoCo) would fly better.
Anyway ... OLCA, as it stands, defines among other properties olca:domainIncludes and olca:rangeIncludes as owl:AnnotationProperty, so that they can be included in OWL ontologies without interfering with the core semantics. 
I hope it will provide a way for lightly constrained popular vocabularies such as Dublin Core, SKOS and FOAF to play nicely together, through loose coupling declarations such as the one given as example.

dcterms:subject a  rdf:Property
    olca:domainIncludes   foaf:Document;
    olca:rangeIncludes    skos:Concept.

A proposal which seems to address the open range issue for DC terms. One can expect the subject (yes, I know, vocabulary clashes here) of dcterms:subject to be a foaf:Document, and it's OK, and the object to be a skos:Concept, and it's OK, but neither of those are constrained. The same property can link other classes as well, and it's OK. 

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