I think you're "better" graphic has an extra rdf:domain where an rdf:range should be.

Brian

On Jun 25, 2009, at 2:59 AM, Bernhard Schandl wrote:

Hi,

a couple of times now I ran into misunderstandings by students regarding a common visualization style of property domain/range relationships in ontologies. Actually, it is quite common to draw diagrams of ontologies in a style similar to ER diagrams, where classes are represented as ellipses, and properties that have these classes as domain/range are represented as arcs between these ellipses (e.g. [1], which is meant to describe the domain and range for foaf:holdsAccount).

However many "newbies" to RDF and ontologies are confused by this, because the triple

foaf:Agent foaf:holdsAccount foaf:OnlineAccount .

is actually not contained in the ontology. It's hard to explain them the difference between this way of representing ontologies and the graphical representation of the actual triples. Thus I ask everyone to reconsider the way you visualize ontologies in publications, tutorials, etc. to make them consistent with the "normal" way of graphical RDF notation.

[1] <http://www.ifs.univie.ac.at/schandl/2009/06/domain+range_bad.png>
[2] <http://www.ifs.univie.ac.at/schandl/2009/06/domain+range_better.png >

Best,
Bernhard




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