Re: Rich Annotations Use Cases

From: Vojtech Svatek <Svatek@vse.cz>
Subject: Re: Rich Annotations Use Cases
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:08:30 +0100

[...]

> Dear all,
> sorry if I am wrong - I am entirely new to the WG and may not have good
> understanding of many issues - but it seems to me that annotations could be
> used for a lot of interesting and 'semantic' purposes connected to design
> patterns, visualisation etc.
> For example:
> - indicating that a certain concept is a reified n-ary relationship, cf.
> http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-n-aryRelations/
> - naming the feature that is responsible for a class partition (or
> generally subclassing), e.g. if the class Person is partitioned to
> Employee, Student and Retired, the partition could be labelled as
> 'professional status' or the like.
> It is important that such distinctions are not only consumable by humans.
> When (semi-)automatically mapping ontologies, it often occurs that similar
> parts of a domain are modelled differently (say, using different logical
> patterns) in different ontologies, and such additional information could
> help a lot I believe.
> 
> Regards
> Vojtech

Sure, but how would this work, and what support from the WG is needed?
I can imagine doing this already in a number of ways, some of which can
utilize annotations and some of which don't.

For an example of a way that needs neither annotations nor WG support,
you could just do something like:

	Declaration(OWLClass(ex:n-ary-relation-superclass))

and make concepts representing n-ary relations subclasses of this
structural class, even use classes-as-instances and make the class URIs
instances of a particular individual, perhaps ex:n-ary-relation.

The extra-OWL import of these special names would then be used by UI and
ontology integration tools.

NB:  I'm not advocating these as reasonable solutions, just pointing out
that there can be other ways of providing "structural" information than
annotations.

peter

Received on Tuesday, 6 November 2007 13:37:48 UTC