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

[Eyal Oren]

On 09/28/06/09/06 11:46 +0200, Andre Meyer wrote:
>The general discussion is not Redland-specific, indeed. Your point wrt. OWL is
>interesting and that is what I am after - an ontology that describes my domain
>concepts (not the entire Semantic Web) and which allows me to use (interprete,
>infer, etc.) information using the knowledge that is specified by one or more
>ontologies.
>
>However, Redland does not support OWL, so I was wondering whether RDFS might
>help. Obviously, it does not. I also forgot to mention that I am looking for
>RDF/RDFS/OWL tools in Python ;-) If you know of anything useful beyond what has
>been mentioned so far, please let me know.
Sorry, I'm again not very useful ;-)

But your point that Redland does not support OWL but that it does support 
RDFS, is not exactly true. Redland is only an RDF store.  Both OWL and RDFS 
are RDF, but they are RDF vocabularies with a certain semantics.  This 
semantics is not considered by Redland, neither for OWL nor for RDFS. 

So Redland "supports" OWL in the sense that you can perfectly store and 
retrieve OWL statements in it (because they are RDF statements), but it 
doesn't interpret these statements in the special way that the OWL 
semantics spefication mandates.

For what you want, you should be looking into OWL reasoners, which I have 
no experience whatsoever with.  Or you could implement your own validation, 
by querying the Redland RDF store and figuring out if the data conforms to 
your validation rules.

hth,

 -eyal