Questions/Concerns about the Data Cube Vocabulary

Dear Data Cube group,


The Data Cube Vocabulary came to my attention as part of my mentoring of a  
Google Summer of Code student, who is using the vocab to model data for  
e.g. Genome Wide Association Studies in biomedicine.  My personal interest  
in the vocabulary is more from a Semantic Web perspective, and therefore I  
am looking at it with an eye to using it with OWL reasoners.

It is in this latter respect that I have some concerns about the  
vocabulary, and I'm hoping you will engage me in this conversation, to  
either confirm or correct my interpretations and concerns :-)

I'll start with my primary concern, which is that some of your terms seem  
to be used both as predicates and as classes.  For example:

Class: qb:DimensionProperty Sub class of: qb:ComponentProperty,  
qb:CodedProperty

  eg:refArea a rdf:Property, qb:DimensionProperty;
  rdfs:label "reference area"@en;
  rdfs:subPropertyOf sdmx-dimension:refArea;
  rdfs:range admingeo:UnitaryAuthority;
  qb:concept sdmx-concept:refArea .


In OWL, properties and classes are disjoint, so... it looks like the set  
of statements above violate this rule in that DimensionProperty is  
declared as a Class (which itself is at least grammatically odd) and then  
refArea is declared as both an rdf:Property *and* a  
DimensionProperty(Class)...  This situation would make reasoners very  
unhappy!  There are numerous examples of this in the data cube vocabulary.

Are my concerns justified, or am I mis-interpreting the vocabulary?  I  
realize that there is nothing *wrong* with the structure, I just have  
concerns about using it as a sem-web vocabulary; it would be a shame if we  
weren't able to do reasoning over data cubes!

I'd be very grateful if someone from the working group would engage me in  
this discussion :-)

Best wishes!

Mark




-- 
Dr. Mark D. Wilkinson
Isaac Peral Senior Researcher, Biological Informatics
Centro de Biotecnología y Genómica de Plantas UPM-INIA (CBGP)
Campus Montegancedo,
Autopista M-40 (Km 38)
28223-Pozuelo de Alarcón (Madrid)

Received on Wednesday, 10 July 2013 12:26:37 UTC