Re: Examples of OWL used for datatype inferencing?

OWL's datatype support is currently fairly rudimentry and does not
include any means of expressing the kinds of knowledge you
describe. One way to do so, while still maintaining decidability (for
OWL DL at least) would be to extend the language with n-ary datatype
predicates (see, e.g., [1]). Another way would be to include
arithmetic built-ins in an expressive extension such as horn rules
(see, e.g., [2]), but this would almost certainly make the language
undecidable.

Ian

[1] http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~horrocks/Publications/download/2003/PaHo03a.pdf
[2] http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~horrocks/DAML/Rules/


On October 31, Graham Klyne writes:
> 
> [I originally asked this on RDF-IG, but realize this is probably the better 
> forum. #g]
> 
> Does anyone have any examples of using OWL to perform RDF-datatype-related 
> inferencing?
> 
> I'm thinking of datatypes, such as numbers, for which additional properties 
> are used to define additional relations, such as addition over numbers.
> 
> For example, given:
> 
>     :vehicle :seatedCapacity "30"^^xsd:integer .
>     :vehicle :standingCapacity "10"^^xsd:integer .
> 
> and knowledge that the total capacity is seated capacity + standing 
> capacity, that one might infer:
> 
>     :vehicle :totalCapacity "40"^^xsd:integer .
> 
> This might be expressed thus using CWM-style rules:
> 
>     { ?v :seatedCapacity ?c1 .
>       ?v :standingCapacity ?c2 .
>       (?c1 ?c2) math:sum ?c3 . }
> =>
>     { ?v :totalCapacity ?c3 . }
> 
> It seems to me that to express such relations one must have a form of 
> universal quantification.  But I'm not sure if anything in OWL performs 
> such a purpose, so I struggle to see how one might express an idea like 
> that above.
> 
> Behind this question, I'm trying to see if there's a way to abstract the 
> rules of datatype properties away from particular application 
> domain.  (i.e. using just RDF statements, and not rules, to express ideas 
> like the example above, appealing only to application-independent rules 
> defined on datatyped values.)  Currently I'm not seeing any way to do this, 
> but before I give up I wanted to see how OWL (as the major thrust for Sweb 
> inference) deals with such issues.
> 
> #g
> 
> 
> ------------
> Graham Klyne
> For email:
> http://www.ninebynine.org/#Contact

Received on Sunday, 2 November 2003 05:46:42 UTC