Unique Name Assumption

[Bernard Vatant]

Hi all

Just lurking at this list, but wanted to push my 2 cents here

> It does not seem to me to be a good idea to make individual 
> elements/atoms instances in the first place.  
Why so? If you create a class, I guess you want to figure what is an 
instance of this class. If you look at the properties with range 
"AtomicElement" such as "hasSpectralLine", they look like they assume 
the  instances are not individual atoms, but "generic elements". When I 
say that "Sun" "hasSpectralLine" "He", I guess "He" does not refer to a 
specific atom of Helium, right?

> What if someone needs to refer to a specific atom sitting in their 
> Atomic Force Microscope (AFM)?  For this you would want to make an 
> individual of the Class Carbon.
I think they would need another class, "IndividualAtom", with subclasses 
such as "HeliumAtom". Now the link with the previous structure can be 
done using "allValuesFrom" constraints on a property "hasElementType", 
stating that being an individual  instance of the "HeliumAtom" class is 
equivalent to having "He" as value of "hasElementType".
> <Carbon rdf:ID="MyCarbonAtom"/> where Carbon is a class.  This also 
> makes it possible to add isotopic species as subclasses.  We should 
> refrain from using individuals except for a named individual in the 
> universe: Earth, Algol, M31, Mike Brown, MyBigRedChair.
An Individual in OWL-RDF is not necessarily a "physical individual". It 
can be a concept. See for example concepts in a thesaurus, like in SKOS 
vocabulary. They are instances.

Best

Bernard
-- 

*Bernard Vatant
*Knowledge Engineering
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