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I'm new to RDF and am having trouble wrapping my head around the distinction between a regular vanilla class, and explicitly declaring its rdf:type as rdf:property. Everything I can find suggests the main reason revolves around enabling domain and range declarations, but I also read that defining a range or domain on a class automatically confers the rdf:property status on it anyway.

Say i have a class "stockSymbol" and it has a certain "assetClass". An instance of a stock (say MSFT) would have a property (:assetClass) of "common stock". But if an asset class is a more complex concept than simply a property, it would seem that :assetClass is now explicitly a property AND a class, leading to potentially weird behavior or implications.

I'm probably missing some fundamental nuance of what rdf:property imbues a resource with but I'm not sure what. Can anyone help set me straight?

Xedni
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    rdf:Property is the root of the tahonomy describing the set of resources used to 'label' links between nodes in the RDF graph. You may have subclasses of rdf:Property capturing particular meaning like a property being transitive, symmetric, reflexive etc. On other hand domain and range imply particular class membership to the nodes linked with such property. E.g. :motherOf rdfs:domain :Female imply that the subject of (:mary :motherOf :John) is member of :Female class – Damyan Ognyanov Oct 09 '18 at 07:09
  • So since both properties and classes are just uris, way happens if you use an object not identified as a rdf:property as the predicate of a triple? Or of youuse an object that *is* identified as a rdf:property as a subject or object? – Xedni Oct 09 '18 at 15:41
  • It is perfectly safe to use URIs on predicate position, it will entail that these are of type rdf:Property. A good read is section 3.1 from RDF concepts at https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-concepts/#section-Concepts and section 8.1 from RDF semantics at https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-rdf11-mt-20140225/#rdf-entailment – Damyan Ognyanov Oct 10 '18 at 07:00
  • Thanks Damyan. If you'd like to post this as the answer, I'll mark it as such. – Xedni Oct 11 '18 at 14:06

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