An owl:backwardCompatibleWith
statement, that is an instance of
owl:OntologyProperty, contains a reference to another ontology. This identifies the
specified ontology as a prior version of the containing ontology, and further
indicates that it is backward compatible with it. In particular, this indicates
that all identifiers from the previous version have the same intended
interpretations in the new version. Thus, it is a hint to document authors that
they can safely change their documents to commit to the new version (by simply
updating namespace declarations and owl:imports statements to refer to the URL
of the new version). If owl:backwardCompatibleWith is not declared
for two versions, then compatibility should not be assumed.
owl:backwardCompatibleWith is a built-in OWL property with the
class owl:Ontology as its domain and range.
<rdf:Property rdf:ID="backwardCompatibleWith">
<rdfs:label>backwardCompatibleWitesh</rdfs:label>
<rdf:type rdf:resource="#OntologyProperty"/>
<rdfs:domain rdf:resource="#Ontology"/>
<rdfs:range rdf:resource="#Ontology"/>
</rdf:Property>
If a property o is used where an ontology property is expected
then it should either be one of the built in ontology properties
(owl:imports, owl:priorVersion,
owl:backwardCompatibleWith, and owl:incompatibleWith)
or there should be a triple:
o rdf:type owl:OntologyProperty
<owl:Ontology rdf:about="">
<rdfs:comment>Vehicle Ontology, v. 1.1</rdfs:comment>
<owl:backwardCompatibleWith rdf:resource="http://www.example.org/vehicle-1.0"/>
<owl:priorVersion rdf:resource="http://www.example.org/vehicle-1.0"/>
</owl:Ontology>
The ontology-import construct owl:imports and the
ontology-versioning constructs owl:priorVersion,
owl:backwardCompatibleWith and owl:incompatibleWith are defined in the OWL
vocabulary as instances of the OWL built-in class owl:OntologyProperty. Instances of
owl:OntologyProperty must have the class owl:Ontology
as their domain and range.
owl:backwardCompatibleWith has no meaning in the model theoretic
semantics other than that given by the RDF(S) model theory.