RE: Question about ontology

Dear Sybri team,



My first question would be the question of existence-dependency, in other
words: which terms are needed to define others? In this case it seems to me
that “empty bottle”, “liquid”, and “pouring” all preceed “full bottle”.



The semantic structure at hand then is: the context of “pouring” defines
“full bottle” in terms of “empty bottle” and “liquid”.

In other words: pouring **is** not a relation between empty bottle and
liquid, it **defines** such relations.

Such contextuality however cannot be expressed by OWL-type ontologies.



If you would however want to stick to the OWL world, then part-of would
work perfectly I guess, but then I would see “pouring” as part-of “full
bottle” as well. There is no upfront semantic reason not to.



Regards,



Paul



*From:* System Bridge [mailto:sysbri1@gmail.com]
*Sent:* maandag 9 september 2013 13:32
*To:* public-owl-dev@w3.org
*Subject:* Question about ontology



Hello,

we are group of PHD students and we would like to ask you (ontology
experts) for help/advice.

We`re trying to make a simple expert system using ontology as knowledge
base. We have come to few problems and before making any conclusions, we
would like to confront it with you.



We noticed that every explanation and example we found uses object
hierarchy, e.g. OneThing isPartOf OtherThing or OneThing hasPart
OtherThings. We don`t know how to model process which also causes that
resulting object will be assembled from some other objects. For example:

   a) Object Empty bottle

   b) Object Liquid
   c) Process: Liquid will be poured into the Empty bottle and thus will
create some new object Bottle filled with liquid - see image attached.


What we need is to define a relation “Pouring” that is between liquid and
empty bottle. In fact we don’t really need “is part of” relations if there
is a way to express “is part of” implicitly in “Pouring” relation, because
it is obvious that the "Bottle with liquid" was created by "Pouring" the
"Liquid" into the "Empty bottle". Also the direction of "Pouring" is
important for us.

So, the question is whether you may help us either by explaining this
particular example or providing us with helpful source of information how
to solve it.

Thanks in advance

Your sincerely

Sybri team, University of Zilina, Slovakia[image: Inline image 1]