Deprecation is a feature commonly used in versioning software (for example, see the Java programming language) to indicate that a particular feature is preserved for backward-compatibility purposes, but may be phased out in the future.
Here, a
specific identifier is said to be of type owl:DeprecatedProperty,
a subclass of
rdf:Property.
<rdfs:Class rdf:ID="DeprecatedProperty">
<rdfs:label>DeprecatedProperty</rdfs:label>
<rdfs:subClassOf rdf:resource="&rdf;Property"/>
</rdfs:Class>
An example of deprecation is:
<owl:Class rdf:ID="Car"/>
<owl:ObjectProperty rdf:ID="hasDriver"/>
<owl:DeprecatedProperty rdf:ID="drives">
<owl:inverseOf rdf:resource="#hasDriver"/>
<rdfs:comment>inverse property hasDriver is now preferred</rdfs:comment>
</owl:DeprecatedProperty>
By deprecating a term, it means that the term should not be used in new documents that commit to the ontology. This allows an ontology to maintain backward-compatibility while phasing out an old vocabulary (thus, it only makes sense to use deprecation in combination with backward compatibility). As a result, it it easier for old data and applications to migrate to a new version, and thus can increase the level of adoption of the new version. This has no meaning in the model theoretic semantics other than that given by the RDF(S) model theory. However, authoring tools may use it to warn users when checking OWL markup.
Do not use.