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

> > 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.

I'm afraid I don't entirely understand your technique. How can such an
approach be used to solve the use case?

I was thinking that the user should be able to query for employees in
the Management or Support groups with a simple query on the RDF.
Ideally, the OWL ontology shouldn't require them to completely
reformulate their query. (An approach that uses owl constructs even for
plain RDF queries is one solution.)

In terms of my contention that this issue can't be mapped to RDF
triples, I think your example only demonstrates that result. Simple RDF
semantics can't encode the information we want, so we need to use an OWL
formulation. There are certain ways to encode queries into OWL
ontologies and then use an inference engine to try to get relevent
inferences, but we certainly don't have any use cases demonstrating this
kind of "late binding"--the naive inferred triple approach usually
assumes that the ontology itself implies an inferred RDF model, and that
all queries can traverse the same model.

Received on Monday, 12 April 2004 12:00:37 UTC