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

Hi Khalid,

Can the structure and vocabulary be in separate ontologies?
This would allow the vocabulary to be kept as simple as possible, as 
close to the data model as possible.
I don't think it would be a requirement for the structure-part to be 
OWL-RL compatible.
Thoughts?

Luc

On 02/23/2012 10:59 AM, Khalid Belhajjame wrote:
>
> 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
>

-- 
Professor Luc Moreau
Electronics and Computer Science   tel:   +44 23 8059 4487
University of Southampton          fax:   +44 23 8059 2865
Southampton SO17 1BJ               email: l.moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk
United Kingdom                     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lavm

Received on Thursday, 23 February 2012 11:44:41 UTC