- From: Phillip Lord <phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk>
- Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2006 11:47:20 +0100
- To: "David Decraene" <David@landcglobal.com>
- Cc: <public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>
>>>>> "DD" == David Decraene <David@landcglobal.com> writes: DD> In large scale ontologies, one link should suffice, DD> HasPart, and whether the part is a finger, toe, nail, muscle or DD> anything else is not a task for the property to describe, but DD> for the target I'm not sure why this should be true for large ontologies. It seems to me that this is just a question of modelling style. Either way should actually work depending on what you are trying to achieve. Having multiple properties allows you to provide different properties to the properties which can be useful. If, in your example, you have a super property "hasPart", then it seems to me that it would be relatively straight forward to reduce the information content of the ontology so that the subproperties are no longer represented. So hand some hasDigit Finger can be represented as hand some hasPart Finger. DD> In formal ontology you could express this relation DD> on a general level of parthood: <Hand> HasPart <6thfinger>, DD> cardinality 0. This is not possible in OWL. Many people have used subproperties to do something like this. It's a poor hack for representing qualified cardinality (and doesn't capture exactly the same semantics). But it is only a hack. As others have said, the lack of qualified cardinality in OWL is generally regarded as unfortunate, and it should be coming back in. Phil -- Phillip Lord, Phone: +44 (0) 191 222 7827 Lecturer in Bioinformatics, Email: phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk School of Computing Science, http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/phillip.lord Newcastle University, Claremont Tower, Room 909 NE1 7RU
Received on Thursday, 21 September 2006 11:38:49 UTC