RE: Relationships and Relations

Hi,

 

Discussion about this are rather fruitless when you don’t share the same upper ontology.

That is clear when we speak about alternative realities and fake news.

 

It is therefore advisable to define what these terms really mean.

 

Our (ISO 15926) definitions are:

 

* An Event is a space-time extension with zero time extension, and marks the temporal boundaries of one or more individuals.
* A Relationship is the classification of an ordered pair. No two relationships of the same classification have the same pair in the same order. The order enables roles to be assigned to the related things.
* A CauseOfEvent is a Relationship that indicates that the caused Event is caused by the causer Activity.

* EXAMPLE The relation that indicates that the testing activity caused the event described as 'test completed' can be represented by an instance of CauseOfEvent.

* etc (we have 201 such definitions)

 

This does not mean that Michael’s statements are incorrect. They are just not ISO 15926 compliant.

 

When you want to achieve interoperability between information systems in a certain domain of discourse you need to define such an upper ontology, extended by a vocabulary with taxonomies of instances and lower ontologies.

 

About Relationship: many Relationship instances are the result of an Activity, e.g. Marrying – Marriage, Assembling – Assembly, Containing – Containment, Connecting – Connection, Employing – Employment, etc.

We model that by typing a Relationship with a (meta) ClassOfRelationshipWithSignature that is defined as:

* A ClassOfRelationshipWithSignature is a ClassOfRelationship that may have a RoleAndDomain specified for each end.  (where RoleAndDomain simply stands for ‘a Class in a Role’)

 

Here is a rather far-fetched example:

 



 

The instance of ClassOfActivity CONNECTING-A-TRAIN

:CONNECTING-A-TRAIN rdf:type dm:ClassOfActivity .

:CONNECTING-A-TRAIN :hasPartiipant1 RoleAndDomain1 .

:CONNECTING-A-TRAIN :hasPartiipant2 RoleAndDomain2 .

:RoleAndDomain1 rdfs:subClassOf rdl:LOCOMOTIVE .

:RoleAndDomain1 rdfs:subClassOf rdl:PULLER .

:RoleAndDomain2 rdfs:subClassOf rdl:TRAIN WAGON .

:RoleAndDomain2 rdfs:subClassOf rdl:PULLED .

The instance of ClassOfRelationshipWithSignature

:CONNECTION-OF-A-TRAIN rdf:type dm:ClassOfRelationshipWithSignature .

:CONNECTION-OF-A-TRAIN :hasClassOfEnd1 RoleAndDomain1 .

:CONNECTION-OF-A-TRAIN :hasClassOfEnd2 RoleAndDomain2 .

The typed Relationship

:myRelationship rdf:type tpl:CONNECTION-OF-A-TRAIN ;

:myRelationship :hasPuller myLocomotive ;

:myRelationship :hasPulled myTrainWagon .

 

An instance of Relationship, typed with this metaclass CONNECTION-OF-TRAIN, can be linked to an instance of Activity, typed with ClassOfActivity CONNECTING-A-TRAIN, with an instance of above CauseOfEvent. 

When I connect a train I cause the Event ‘train is connected’, which leads to a state that the locomotive and the trainwagon instances are connected, a fact that is recorded with an instance of ConnectionOfTrain relationship.

 

I’ll get off my soapbox :)

 

Regards,

Hans 

15926.org <http://15926.org/> 

_____________________________________________

From: Anthony Moretti <anthony.moretti@gmail.com> 
Sent: dinsdag 12 november 2019 03:19
To: Chris Mungall <cjmungall@lbl.gov>
Cc: Michael F Uschold <uschold@gmail.com>; Laufer <laufer@globo.com>; Semantic Web' <semantic-web@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Relationships and Relations

 

Hi Michael

If I can refine that minor point, just my opinion again, but Relationship and Event seem to be equivalent actually, rather than one being a subclass of the other. An interesting thing to look at is the YAGO knowledge base <https://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/departments/databases-and-information-systems/research/yago-naga/yago/> , where every statement can have a start time, end time, and location attached to it. The main point I wanted to make though was that it's useful to distinguish between a Relation and a Relationship in my opinion. The Event/Relationship argument is fascinating though.

Regards,

Anthony

 

On Mon, Nov 11, 2019 at 6:12 PM Chris Mungall <cjmungall@lbl.gov <mailto:cjmungall@lbl.gov> > wrote:

The singleton property pattern can be problematic with OWL. I have a draft of an article about this with Michel Dumontier: 

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jtEZCDQ26R2YnqXr_XcPEgsC9yiWOFqWAR0B5TDFBnA/edit

 

On Mon, Nov 11, 2019 at 5:42 PM Michael F Uschold <uschold@gmail.com <mailto:uschold@gmail.com> > wrote:

Singleton properties are interesting, I have read that paper before. I suspect it may be overkill for what Hans needs.

 

Michael 

 

On Sun, Nov 10, 2019 at 12:12 PM Laufer <laufer@globo.com <mailto:laufer@globo.com> > wrote:

Hi, Hans,

Maybe the singleton property could help:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4350149/

Regards,

Laufer

Em 09/11/2019 9:24, hans.teijgeler@quicknet.nl <mailto:hans.teijgeler@quicknet.nl>  escreveu:

Hi,

 

I would like to hear your opinion about the following.

 

I propose to make a distinction between the terms ‘Relationship’ an ‘Relation’ (‘Property’), not for linguistic reasons but to avoid reification when that is not necessary.

I know that I am on thin ice, so be it.

 

Right now we have  something like 

* Pete isHusbandOf Mary
* Mary isWifeOf Pete.

But these Relations/Properties actually are Roles in a missing Relationship called Marriage.

 

We can also state:

* MarriagePeteMary hasHusband Pete
* MarriagePeteMary hasWife Mary

where MarriagePeteMary is Relationship and an instance of the owl:Class ‘Marriage’, or rather its specialization ‘Hetero Marriage’.

As a consequence we can easily represent information about that Relationship.

 

It appears to me that there are many such Relationships that qualify for being an owl:Class in their own right.

Think about Parenthood, Composition, Employment, etc.

 

Please concur or shoot.

 

Regards,

Hans 

15926.org <http://15926.org/> 

 

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