- From: Peter F. Patel-Schneider <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>
- Date: Tue, 06 Nov 2007 08:26:06 -0500 (EST)
- To: Svatek@vse.cz
- Cc: public-owl-wg@w3.org
From: Vojtech Svatek <Svatek@vse.cz> Subject: Re: Rich Annotations Use Cases Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:08:30 +0100 [...] > Dear all, > sorry if I am wrong - I am entirely new to the WG and may not have good > understanding of many issues - but it seems to me that annotations could be > used for a lot of interesting and 'semantic' purposes connected to design > patterns, visualisation etc. > For example: > - indicating that a certain concept is a reified n-ary relationship, cf. > http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-n-aryRelations/ > - naming the feature that is responsible for a class partition (or > generally subclassing), e.g. if the class Person is partitioned to > Employee, Student and Retired, the partition could be labelled as > 'professional status' or the like. > It is important that such distinctions are not only consumable by humans. > When (semi-)automatically mapping ontologies, it often occurs that similar > parts of a domain are modelled differently (say, using different logical > patterns) in different ontologies, and such additional information could > help a lot I believe. > > Regards > Vojtech Sure, but how would this work, and what support from the WG is needed? I can imagine doing this already in a number of ways, some of which can utilize annotations and some of which don't. For an example of a way that needs neither annotations nor WG support, you could just do something like: Declaration(OWLClass(ex:n-ary-relation-superclass)) and make concepts representing n-ary relations subclasses of this structural class, even use classes-as-instances and make the class URIs instances of a particular individual, perhaps ex:n-ary-relation. The extra-OWL import of these special names would then be used by UI and ontology integration tools. NB: I'm not advocating these as reasonable solutions, just pointing out that there can be other ways of providing "structural" information than annotations. peter
Received on Tuesday, 6 November 2007 13:37:48 UTC