[prov-o] How to express Involvement as as an "Abstract" class in OWL

• From: Khalid Belhajjame <Khalid.Belhajjame@cs.man.ac.uk>
• Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2012 10:59:40 +0000
• To: W3C provenance WG <public-prov-wg@w3.org>
• Message-ID: <4F461C1C.4070709@cs.man.ac.uk>

In the prov-o ontology, the involvement class is used as a mean for 
giving a structure to the ontology. There are different types of 
involvement, e.g., Usage, Generation and Derivation. However, as it is, 
the ontology allows specifying an instance of Involvement that is not an 
instance of any of its sub-classes. That should not be allowed.

In OWL, the notion of abstract class does not exist, however, one thing 
that can be done to avoid the above issue is to ass a constraint 
specifying that Involvement is equivalent to the class constructed by 
unionining its sub-class. While this solution is plausible, I am not 
sure if this constraint is OWL-RL compatible. I suspect so, but we need 
a confirmation.

The same problem occurs in other cases in the ontology where the classes 
have been introduced for shaping the structure of the ontology, for 
example Element, ActivityInvolvement, EntityInvolvement and 
AgentInvolvement.

khalid

Received on Thursday, 23 February 2012 11:00:03 UTC