RE: OWL Web Ontology Language

Or the example I raised in the past:
How do you represent the fact that the Ford Company (an Individual)
manufactures Mustangs (a Class)?
Hans 

-----Original Message-----
From: semantic-web-request@w3.org [mailto:semantic-web-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Peter F. Patel-Schneider
Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2006 20:25
To: bdn_01@hotmail.com
Cc: semantic-web@w3.org
Subject: Re: OWL Web Ontology Language


public-webont-comments@w3.org is probably not the best email list for this
sort of question, as the list is designed for comments about the OWL
documents themselves.  However, let me take a stab at your question anyway.
I've cc'ed semantic-web@w3.org which is probably a better list for this kind
of question.

From: "Bdn 01" <bdn_01@hotmail.com>
Subject: OWL Web Ontology Language
Date: 4 Mar 2006 14:59:33 -0800

> OWL Web Ontology (XML Presentation Syntax)
> Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2006 22:59:28 +0000
> Mime-Version: 1.0
> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I have been following the development of the web ontology work for 
> over a year now and found the work on this topic extremely exciting. I 
> do now however have a concern that it does not cater for the situation 
> where an individual's property value may be neither a datatype, or 
> another Individual, but rather a class.
> 
> The reason I write is I would prefer to correctly apply the [OWL] 
> standards than extend the standards to cater for what (to me at least) 
> seems to be a standard case. I have posted the example below to help 
> ilustrate this
> scenario:
> 
> How to express that a child has a preference for dogs rather than cats 
> as a pet?
> - A given child is an individual with property "hasPetPreference".
> - A dog or a cat is a class (we should allow for identifying an actual 
> beast as an individual having class dog or cat).
> 
> Rgds
> Brendan


The problem with all such examples is determining just what they are
supposed to mean.  Do you want to say that the preference is somehow for the
class "Dog"
versus the class "Cat", as, perhaps, one might prefer "PrimeNumber" to
"OddInteger" because the class of prime numbers are somehow more interesting
than the class of odd integer; do you want to say that the preference is
somehow for most dogs over most cats; or do you want to say that the
preference is somehow for all dogs over all cats.  True modelling should
take the differences into account.

All that said, there is an effort to extend OWL in a way that gives you a
light-weight way to at least state a relationship between an individual and
a class.  In this extension, OWL 1.1, class names can be also used as names
of individuals, so you could state

	Class(Dog)
	Class(Cat)
	ObjectProperty(hasPetPreference)
	Individual(john value(hasPetPreference Dog))
	Individual(jill value(hasPetPreference Cat))

For more information on OWL 1.1, see
http://owl-workshop.man.ac.uk/OWL1_1.html

Peter F. Patel-Schneider
Bell Labs Research

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Received on Thursday, 16 March 2006 20:29:28 UTC