Re: [ontolog-forum] The notion of a "classification criterion" as a class

Thank you indeed for your detailed replies.

Your comments gave me the pleasant impression that my original message
managed to characterize the nature of the problem that I am trying to
untangle.  At the same time I realize that I have some misconceptions
on the use of OWL (OWL-DL) and on how I am approaching the modeling of
these examples.

I would like to take the feedback gathered and put forward a new
version of these examples where the representation of a
"classification criterion" of a domain concept is better aligned with
the capabilities and intended use of OWL-DL.

In the meantime, there are a few clarifications that I would like to
make which can be found below in-line.

Thanks again,
Bene

>>> In the process I have come across what I think it is an interesting
>>> modeling scenario. Let me use a simple example to describe it
>>> extracted from [1].  Consider the following set of classes (as a
>>> subset of a larger ontology model) in the popular domain of "family
>>> relationships" organized according to the following subsumption
>>> hierarchy:
>>> :Person
>>>     |-- :Man
>>>     |-- :Woman
>>>     |-- :Parent
>>>     |-- :Child
>>>     |-- :Sibling
>
> I am not sure what is meant by the class, Child.  This could mean every
> person under a certain age,  or any person who
> has a living parent.  Parent and Sibling, as classes, could mean those
> who have ever had a child/sibling or those who currently
> have one.

I think for the characterization I was trying to make of the problem
these distinctions may not play a major part, however in order to
clarify the context, the way I was looking at these classes was
:Parent, :Sibling and :Child(or :Offspring maybe) those who currently
have a living child, sibling and parent respectively.

>>> - Are these classes :PersonByGender and :PersonByKinship in fact
>>> meta-classes?
>
> Yes, they are.  And they are not subclasses of Person.  Their instances
> are subclasses of person.
>
>> I have no idea what a meta-class is, in your view. But if they are OWL
>> classes, then they are identical to the OWL class Person.

By meta-classes I was also referring to "classes of classes". I think
Doug's reply have detailed the intended idea very well.

>
> Reference [2] does not have classes WineByColor and WineByGrape.
>>> :Wine
>>>     |-- :WineByColor
>>>     |   |-- :WhiteWine
>>>     |   |-- :RedWine
>>>     |   |-- (etc.)
>>>     |-- :WineByGrape
>>>          |-- :PinotGrigioWine
>>>          |-- :MerlotWine
>>>          |-- :CabernetSauvignonWine
>>>          |-- (etc.)

That is true.  I guess I should have specified that :WineByColor and
:WineByGrape were *not* part of the original example in [2].  I
modified [2] and introduced them to show another "intuitive" case of
the same modeling problem that could be easily related to the example
of :Person.

>>> - Are there some guidelines or good-practices on how to represent
>>> concepts that correspond to a “classification criterion” of the
>>> domain concept that is being modeled?
>>
>> No.
>
> This is done in higher-order ontology languages such as Cyc.  See [3] or
> [4].

Thanks for the references.

New findings to follow hopefully very soon.

Bene

Received on Monday, 19 April 2010 17:45:11 UTC