Combined Inverse Functional Properties

Combined Inverse Functional Properties (CIFP) are one solution to what
is known as the Multi Column Key problem in databases.

Another solution is the one up on the wiki under the name
CoordinateProperty [Ø].

I have myself come across this problem and found a nice relation between
both of these ways of thinking of the problem for my special case [1].

As I am working with the perspective of finding a simple mapping
between java interfaces and rdf, the solution I found does not seem
to be general enough. For one it requires an extra relation, which in my
example [1] was easily available, but in other cases may seem a little
artificial.

There has been some thought on CIFPs recently, and a paper has even been
published [2] but it seems to go a lot further than what I was looking 
for,
and I am not quite sure about its status.

But it [2] did make me wonder whether it would have been completely
nonsensical to extend OWL in such a way that one could express that
a collections of relations were together, inverse functional.

Something like this I suppose:

default:MWBlog
       a       owl:Class ;
       rdfs:subClassOf owl:Thing ;
       rdfs:subClassOf
               [ a       owl:CombinedRestriction ;
                 owl:onProperties ( default:service,  default:blogId ) ] 
.

If this makes sense then I can at least allow my java classes to be so
annotated, and perhaps express the constraints above in some form of
rules...

But perhaps by doing this I would be stepping on the tail of some 
dormant
dragon?


Henry Story

[Ø] http://esw.w3.org/topic/CoordinateProperty
[1] https://bloged.dev.java.net/servlets/ReadMsg?list=users&msgNo=484
[2] http://osiris.sund.ac.uk/~cs0tco/

Received on Friday, 11 February 2005 12:09:46 UTC