Re: belongsTo

On Fri, 18 Jan 2002 benhood@gmx.net wrote:

> Hallo,
> 
> I was wondering if there was some generic way of expressing "belongsTo"
> between concepts. I have been repeatedly joining two concepts together, that
> don't have any rdfs:subClassOf or rdfs:subPropertyOf relation, say for example
> 
> members of a club/family/organisation
> vocations as members of a union
> planets belonging to a solar system
> possesion of goods/items/qualities/skills/experience

I work on a biological ontology which frequently uses "partOf" to capture
a wide variety of component/subcomponent relationships

eg

subprocessX partOf processY (conceptual composition of biological
processes)

cell-componentX partOf larger-componentY (physical composition eg of
subcellular compartments)

We use this in a strict "necessarilyPartOf" sense.
eg
"door partOf car"
would not be allowed, instead we'd have "car-door partOf car, car-door
subClassOf door". this is better for reasoning.

i'm just getting into rdf/rdfs/daml+oil and i need to convert our ontology
to a standard format - does a standard property exist for this in
daml+oil? i don't want to invent new properties where perfectly good ones
exist.


> These concepts appear to me to have no hierarchial relationship and just
> defining the group as list of its members doesn't seem to do justice to my
> conceptual understanding of the entity "group".
> 
> daml:oneOf seems to do the job in a number of situations, ie
> 
> >>> for oneOf(C, L) read everything in C is one of the things in L;
> 
> but I don't think it hits the nail of the head.
> 
> Does anybody else think one should generalize the concept of belonging to
> something, or I am just missing the point?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Ben 
>