use case: finding employees by type (disjunction and OWL)

A company classifies employees into three groups: management, support,
and engineering. Each employee is assigned to exactly one of these
groups.

There exists an RDF store which encodes information about employees.
This information also includes the office in which the employee works.
E.g.

#David hasGroup #Engineering
#David worksInOffice #Carlsbad

The information is not complete; e.g. there may be employees whose group
is not explicitly stated in the RDF store.

The company also builds an OWL ontology to supplement their RDF data
with semantic information. Among other things, this ontology contains
the assertion that certain corporate locations contain no engineers,
only management and support.

A user wishes to query the RDF store to find all employees who are in
either the management or support groups (and print out their names).


While inferencing and OWL may be beyond the scope of this working group,
this use case demonstrates the continuity from RDF queries to OWL
queries. The user's question can be answered fairly well by a simple RDF
store (with no OWL), but precisely the same query (in terms of the
user's desire for information) can retrieve even better information if
OWL data is available.

Note that this use case is *not* subsumed by any other we are
considering. The use of disjunction makes the OWL ontology incompatible
with the naive "inferred triples" model.

Received on Sunday, 11 April 2004 18:22:02 UTC