Playing with sets in OWL...

Hi all,

sorry for the possible triviality of my questions, or the messed-up mind
I am possibly showing...

I am trying to model the grouping of individuals into sets. In my
application domain, the gene expression, people put together, let's say
genes, associating a meaning to the sets.

For instance:

Set1 := { gene1, gene2, gene3 }

is the set of genes that are expressed in experiment0

(genei and exp0 are OWL individuals)


I am understanding that this may be formalized in OWL by:

- declaring Set1 as owl:subClassOf Gene
- using oneOf to declare the membership of g1,2,3
(or simpler: (g1 type Set1), (g2 type Set1), etc. )
- using hasValue with expressed and exp0

(right?)

Now, I am trying to build an application which is like a semantic wiki.

Hence users have a quite direct contact with the underline ontology, and
they can write, with a simplified syntax, statements about a subject
they are describing (subject-centric approach).

Commiting to the very formal formalism of OWL looks a bit too much...
formal... ;-) and hard to be handled with a semantic wiki-like application.

Another problem is that the set could have properties on its own, for
instance:

Set1 hasAuthor Jhon

meaning that John is defining it. But hasAuthor is typically used for
individuals, and I wouldn't like to fall in OWL-Full, by making an OWL
reasoner to interpret Set1 both as an individual and a class.

Aren't there more informal (although less precise) methods to model
sets, or list of individuals?

An approach could be modeling some sort of set-theory over individuals:

set1 isA GeneSet
set1 hasMember g1, g2, g3
...

set1 derivesFromUnionOf set2, set3

...

But I am not sure it would be a good approach, or if someone else
already tried that.

Any suggestion?


Thanks in advance for a reply.

Cheers.

-- 

===============================================================================
Marco Brandizi <brandizi@ebi.ac.uk>
http://gca.btbs.unimib.it/brandizi

Received on Friday, 8 September 2006 15:59:11 UTC