[OWL] Punning, cocodat

[Alan Ruttenberg]

Hi, some more questions on punning

1) On reading the overview, I see

"...Class(Person partial super(Animal) type(MyClass) value(dc:creator  
peter)) which is syntactic sugar for Class(Person partial) plus
Individual(Person super(Animal) type(MyClass) value(dc:creator peter))"

"super" is a term used on properties, so I don't understand it's use  
in the fact.

2) The punning explanation in the language overview focuses on  
putting properties (via value) on properties and classes, explaining  
that they are asserted on individuals with the same name which bear  
no relation to the class/property. So classes can be on the lhs of a  
property. Can they also be on the rhs? In other words, can I have this:

Class(Person partial)
ObjectProperty(thinksHeIsA)
Individual(Alan value(thinksHeIsA Person))

Would Individual(Person) automatically be asserted?

3) I've recently seen the following pattern, in some early work of  
the HCLSIG, at http://128.36.123.50/NeuroWeb/ - see the CoCoDat  
Ontology in OWL format http://128.36.123.50/NeuroWeb/owl/cocodat.owl

In this, a class hierarchy is given, and an instance of each of the  
leaf classes is created and used as property values on instances  
corresponding to rows in a database. I am presuming that this is to  
replicate the usual case of hierarchical vocabulary, with terms from  
the vocabulary used as field values. However, since these folks want  
to work with OWL, they can't use the terms directly, and so they  
create the corresponding instances.
(picture: http://mumble.net/~alanr/piece-of-cocodat.png)

Now if the answer to 2) is yes, then I might expect that they would  
change their modeling to use the class terms directly. Of course they  
will then find that their non-leaf class queries don't work any more,  
since the individual isn't related to the class. Seeing that they  
might then go and declare that each punned individual is an instance  
of the class of the same name. And I wonder if they did that how well  
that would play with future metamodeling extensions.

Anyways, I'm trying to understand the implications for punning, and  
trying at the same time to figure out whether what neuroweb did was a  
good idea (and if not, what they should have done). And they seemed  
related.

Hope this isn't too confusing (and that I'm not too confused :)

-Alan