Axiom placeholders/ Blank axioms?

I've recently had a modeling issue that I thought I would relate in
the case that someone has some experience/thoughts on whether it
merits an extension to OWL 2.

The case is modeling mixtures, for example tris buffer, which is, say
99% water and 1% tris.

I think I want to create a small DSL for this - the scenario is having
an annotation property that says, e.g.
 "1% tris in 99% h20". (let's assume that tris and h20 are labels for
some classes).

I would write a script that would read those and add the annoyingly
verbose axiom that is the current theory of how to do this in OBO:

has_quality some (concentration
                  and towards some tris
                  and has_value some {1.0})
and has_quality some (concentration
                       and towards some tris
                       and has_value some {99.0})
and has_granular_part some (h20
                             and has_role some 'solvent role')
and has_granular_part some (tris
                             and has_role some 'solute role')

I could have the annotation  "1% tris in 99% h20" be a property of the
class, but in some ways it makes more sense to have it be an
annotation on the EquivalentClasses axiom.

Which raises the question. Does it make sense to enable the ability to
assert a "empty class axiom" that serves as a placeholder and can have
the annotation property attached to it? The script would then find all
such axioms and replace the blank axiom with the expanded on as above,
attaching the annotation to the new axiom and discarding the blank
one.

One doesn't *need* to do this - I could make the annotation on the
class, but I thought I would bounce it off the WG  to see if others
had similar experiences and thought it merits discussion.

Regards,
Alan

Received on Friday, 3 October 2008 18:35:15 UTC