OWL Property Restrictions vs. SHACL

Question

Given a choice between OWL Property Restrictions and SHACL, is there any reason to choose the OWL approach any more?

Particularly with respect to cardinality constraints

Answer 1

In my experience, most users of OWL have not really understood or do not care about the actual semantics of OWL (open-world assumption etc). In many cases, OWL cardinality restrictions have been used because there was no other alternative. Yet, as pointed out elsewhere, the semantics of an owl:maxCardinality 1 is backwards from what most people expect: it means that if the property has two values then those values are assumed to be the same (owl:sameAs). In SHACL, a sh:maxCount 1 means that if the property has two values then one of them needs to be deleted.

The main reasons for continuing to use OWL in favor of SHACL are that OWL has a longer history (i.e. more tools, reusable ontologies and examples), and in case you want to use OWL (DL) inferencing. But if you need traditional closed-world semantics, use SHACL. Note that SHACL and OWL can be mixed, for example define classes and properties in one file, then define OWL restrictions in another file and SHACL constraints in yet another file.