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

On Sun, 2004-04-11 at 17:20, Rob Shearer wrote:
> 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.

I don't believe so. It's straightforward to infer
	Bob rdf:type ManagementOrSupport
from
	Bob rdf:type Management
and
	ManagementOrSupport owl:unionOf (Management Support).

Using hasGroup rather than rdf:type is slightly more tedious,
but just as doable.


-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
see you at the WWW2004 in NY 17-22 May?

Received on Sunday, 11 April 2004 21:38:35 UTC