Re: Advancing translational research with the Semantic Web

>>>>> "PH" == Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us> writes:

  CM> In all the examples given, the "lifted"[*] n-ary relation was
  CM> never truly a relation in the first place and always better
  CM> modeled as a class. It's kind of cheating.
  >> 
  >> Well, it is kind of cheating, yes, although if it works...

  PH> No, really, its not cheating. This reduction of n-ary relations
  PH> to binary+unary relations is quite general and quite sound, and
  PH> has been known and thoroughly understood for over a century. It
  PH> can always be done, and it often makes perfectly good intuitive
  PH> sense. 

No, Chris is right. It's cheating. I have to decide before starting
which of my relations are n-ary and which are not. Moving between the
two is not necessarily a trivial thing to do. And having some
relations being relations and some being classes is less than clear. 

  >> Well, this I would agree with. Folding design patterns in, would
  >> be nice.

  PH> Agreed. We made this a central feature of our COE graphic OWL
  PH> editor, in that a user can design a 'template' (a chunk of OWL
  PH> with gaps in it) and give it a name, then just drag-and-drop one
  PH> into a new OWL concept map and fill in the missing
  PH> parameters. Its a simple device and not perfect, but it does
  PH> seem to be useful.


Yes. Protege does a similar thing. I'd like to see this at a language
level. 

Phil