Re: The Two Dogs Problem

On Fri, 2010-12-17 at 10:04 +0000, Nathan wrote:
> Melvin Carvalho wrote:
> > Apologies if this has come up before.  I was wondering the best way to
> > model the following:
> > 
> > Alice owns a dog.  We choose to model it as follows.
> > 
> > :Alice :owns a dbpedia:dog
> > 
> > All is going well.
> > 
> > Then Alice gets given a second dog.
> > 
> > If we write:
> > 
> > :Alice :owns a dbpedia:dog
> > :Alice :owns a dbpedia:dog
> > 
> > Since RDF is a set, the duplicate triple is disgarded.  So Alice still
> > is described as owning one dog.
> > 
> > Is there a standard way to model Alice owning two dogs?
> 
> Yup, you just be more descriptive, the statements you've made above are 
> probably better said as:
> 
>    :Alice a :DogOwner .
> 
> As you can see (and ask) there's no detail involved, you've simply 
> asserted that :Alice is in the class of all :DogOwner's - thus you just 
> need to be a little more descriptive.
> 
>   :Alice :pet :Patch, :Spot .
>   :Spot a :Dog .
>   :Patch a Dog .
> 
> Or more refined:
> 
>   :Alice :dog :Patch, :Spot .
> 
>   #where the property :dog is like..
>   :dog rdfs:domain :Person ;
>     rdfs:range :Dog ;
>     rdfs:subPropertyOf :pet .
> 
> Or the other way around:
> 
>   :Spot a :Dog, :owner :Alice .
>   :Patch a :Dog, :owner :Alice .
> 
> Now, we can't just simply count those values, since :Spot and :Patch 
> could be two names for the same dog, so you'd need to say that:
> 
>    :Spot owl:differentFrom :Patch .
> or
>    [ a owl:AllDifferent ; owl:members ( :Spot :Patch ) ] .
> 
> 
> Then because we're dealing with open world semantics, we don't know that 
> :Alice only has exactly two dogs, so we could say something like:
> 
>   :Alice a [
>    a owl:Restriction ;
>    owl:minCardinality 2 ;
>    owl:onProperty :dog .
>   ] .
> 
> Which would be the class of anybody with 2 or more dogs, or use 
> owl:cardinality rather than minCardinality to say exactly 2 dogs.
> 
> However, the easiest way, is probably just to do the following, and then 
> you can assert that you know Alice has 2 dogs, given the information you 
> currently have:
> 
>    :Alice :dog :Patch, :Spot .
>    :Spot owl:differentFrom :Patch .

This is a great FAQ.   I love the range of answers.

Another one is to use distinguishing characteristic and then declare OWL
keys [1].

For practical keys, one could use (owner, order-of-acquisition) as a
key.  (The dog I got first is necessarily different from the dog I got
after him.)  Or you could use some kind of registration number.  In the
US, some people register their dogs with akc.org; in my town, you also
have to register dogs with the town each year, and you get a
registration number, so (year-of-registration, town-of-registration,
town-reg-number) would be a good key.   Another option for a set of
characteristics that would almost always be unambiguous would be (name,
date-of-birth, owner of mother).

I haven't actually used keys yet in practice, so I'm not going to try to
provide a working example and get it wrong.  :-)

   -- Sandro


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-primer/#Keys

Received on Friday, 17 December 2010 14:49:11 UTC