[redland-dev] RDFS/OWL and reasoning in Redland

[Eyal Oren]

On 09/27/06/09/06 20:04 +0100, Richard Newman wrote:
>    All right, that is a different, butvalid point of view fromI wanted.
>    Allowing anything to be stated with validation after the fact.
>    Nevertheless, there does not seem to be a facility to allow for checking
>    the validity of statements according to an ontology. What would you
>    suggest? 
>
>
>That's not how the semantic web works.
>
>You can say anything. Everything you say might cause additional information to
>be inferred. That additional information, or the statement itself, might cause
>your knowledge base to become inconsistent. (The Semantic Web as a whole is
>almost certainly inconsistent, if only because of Danny's cats' FOAF profiles!)
be careful what you mean with "the semantic web":

- rdf: there are no rules
- rdfs: there is no inconsistency
- owl: the rest of your email holds

as I explained before, in rdfs there is no way to say "people are not cars" 
so there is no way to get any inconsistency. so there is no need for 
inconsistency checking since it can never occur.  in owl however, 
everything you said holds indeed [1] but the semantic web is not 
necessarily owl.

and now we should probably stop this discussion since it is not redland 
specific, but we could continue it on semantic-web at w3.org.

 -eyal

[1] except that the store doesnt know which statement made it inconsistent: 
it can know that, and it can even tell you, see work on inconsistency 
reasoning, e.g. the logical spreadsheets by mike kassoff and mike 
genesereth at stanford.