Examples of OWL used for datatype inferencing?

[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 Friday, 31 October 2003 13:26:04 UTC