Fine-grained property typing

In OWL-DL whether a role name represented an object or a datatype property was 
inferred 
globally on the basis of the entire ontology. (If it was not possible to infer 
which type a property 
was, then the difference did not make any difference to interpretation of the 
ontology.) It was 
possible to use a property in (for example) cardinality restrictions without 
making it explicit 
which type of property was used.

The current syntax specification requires that every use of a property 
explicitly encode whether 
the property should be treated as a datatype or as an object property. The 
extra verbosity 
required might not be considered an issue for the (already cumbersome) abstract 
syntax, but it 
prevents any terse alternate syntax from being converted to a valid OWL 1.1 
fragment. 
Manchester OWL Syntax, for example, lets one to write expressions along the 
lines of

hasAddress atleast 1

but there are two possible translations of this expression to OWL 1.1:

ObjectMinCardinality(1 hasAddress)

and

DataMinCardinality(1 hasAddress)

This is a significant problem for interfaces which allow users to write OWL 
fragments in isolation.

This issue is related to that of object/datatype property punning. If such 
punning were 
disallowed then there would be no need for such explicit typing.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by jlc...@gmail.com on 11 Jun 2007 at 2:59

sesuncedu / owl1-1

Fine-grained property typing #36