COMMONS13 — Unnecessary description properties in Designators

hasDescription, describes, and isDescribedBy:

• are very vaguely defined
• have unclear usage
• are little to do with the declared scope of Designators (about naming)
• duplicate the more broadly used dct:description
• are only used in two other places (cls:classifies is subPropertyOf describes - which is not semantically valid since a classifier does not "describes the nature of" the thing it classifies) and (qtu;describesActualExpression subPropertyOf hasDescription - would be better as subPropertyOf cmns-doc;specifies)

Unnecessary description properties in Designators

The properties in question come from the semiotic triangle (describes, defines, denotes), and were discussed at length when we first added them to the ontology. They are heavily used in IDMP, FIBO, API4KP, and elsewhere.

They are: describes, isDescribedBy, and hasDescription. With respect to dct:description, which was mentioned in the issue description, that's an rdf:Property commonly used as an annotation property in OWL. hasDescription in the Designators ontology is a data property. A data property is required for use in mapping attributes, where use of an annotation doesn't work. Revising the semantics of Dublin Core in our Commons ontologies would violate best practices in reuse / FAIR use of the vocabulary.

We agreed to add usage notes to the 3 properties in question, as provided in the body of this resolution.

Note too that Dublin Core is not an OWL ontology - it is an RDF vocabulary, and as such cannot be imported in any OWL ontology, only referenced. This is a nuance that many people don't understand, but is really important for consistency across uses. There are many folks out there that incorrectly import Dublin Core unfortunately, but that can cause inconsistency errors for reasoning, among other issues.