Fwd: "Transitive over" properties

This is email from our public list, which Jos has taken to rdf-logic 
(thank Jos)

>X-Original-To: public-webont-comments+aa@frink.w3.org
>From: Mikhail Khlopotov <mik@chel.com.ru>
>To: public-webont-comments@w3.org
>Subject: "Transitive over" properties
>X-Archived-At: http://www.w3.org/mid/3FF80D75.90307@chel.com.ru
>Resent-Date: Sun,  4 Jan 2004 07:58:34 -0500 (EST)
>
>
>Hello!
>
>I'm trying to use OWL in my research, in which I need a way to 
>represent constraints on a semantic network, and while studying OWL 
>and analyzing it's completeness, I found no direct way to express 
>"transitive over" properties, I mean properties, which are not 
>transitive by themselves, but are transitive over another property.
>For example "worksFor" may be considered transitive over 
>"consistsOf", if we have a company consisting of departments.
>
>Are there any ways in current OWL to express such a relations? I 
>suppose, they're vital for part-whole relationship.
>
>Hope, this message is clear to understand ;-)
>
>Sincerely, Mikhail Khlopotov
>South Ural State University, Russia.

I just thought I'd mention here -- NOT seeking any action by the WG, 
that this looks like another case where some sort of "qualification" 
could be used.  I hope the Semantic Web research community will look 
at the general issue of "qualifying relations" and that a future 
version of OWL will gain some nice extension to handle qualified 
cardinality, qualified (non-global) keys, and this sort of qualified 
"transitive property" -- I'm thinking there might be an interesting 
general mechanism here that could be quite powerful in a DL-type 
setting, or perhaps which will provide some interesting use cases to 
any eventual rules group.
  -JH

-- 
Professor James Hendler			  http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-277-3388 (Cell)

Received on Sunday, 4 January 2004 15:18:49 UTC