Inferencing more specific roles

After the recent interesting discussion it was suggested that I share 
any examples that might be useful - and now seems like a good time - so 
here is one.

I came across this whilst building a ‘family ontology’ to investigate 
how the level of redundancy in an OWL ontology (how many different ways 
you can get the same inference through different combinations of axioms) 
might be related to the ability of that OWL ontology to make inferences 
with data from heterogeneous resources that state facts in different 
ways, and specifically where the data can be considered 'minimal'.

In this case, the Property hierarchy looks like:

hasChild	(range Person)
	hasDaughter	(subPropertyOf hasChild, range FemalePerson)
	hasSon		(subPropertyOf hasChild, range Maleperson)

In the class hierarchy we have FemalePerson and MalePerson as disjoint 
subclasses of Person and a covering axiom so that all instances of 
Person are MalePerson or FemalePerson.

In this case I was investigating how Theoretical Datasource 1, that 
states for each individual:

Gender 		(as MalePerson or FemalePerson)
Children	(as hasChild)

could be integrated with another Theoretical Datasource 2, that uses:

Gender		(not asserted, only Person)
Children	(as hasSon and hasDaughter – Genders inferred)

Simply put, the problem with directly integrating these is that in the 
Datasource 1, given the Class assertions:

Vera instanceOf FemalePerson
Jane instanceOf FemalePerson
Vera hasChild Jane

It does not seem possible to infer the more specific relationship:

Vera hasDaughter Jane

that would make the data directly comparable to the representation of 
Datasource 2.


I will leave the description of the problem at that, rather than guess 
at solutions. I have encoded the example in OWL – you can get it here:

http://owl.cs.manchester.ac.uk/repository/download?ontology=http://www.semanticweb.org/ontologies/propertyinferences.owl&version=0&format=RDF/XML

I look forward to hearing whether this would be possible to implement in 
OWL.

Cheers,
Andrew

-- 
Dr Andrew Gibson
Universiteit van Amsterdam

Received on Monday, 11 August 2008 13:35:52 UTC