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Preventing, Detecting, and Revising Flaws in Object Property Expressions

  • Original Article
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Journal on Data Semantics

Abstract

The OWL 2 DL ontology language is very expressive and has many features for declaring complex object property expressions. Standard reasoning services for OWL ontologies take these expressions as correct and according to the ontologist’s intention. However, the more one can do, the higher the chance that modelling flaws are introduced; hence, an unexpected or undesired classification or inconsistency in the class hierarchy may actually be due to a mistake in the ‘object property box’, not the class axioms. We analyse the principles of subsumption in object property hierarchies and use it to identify the types of flaws that can occur in object property expressions. We propose the compatibility services SubProS and ProChainS that check for meaningful property hierarchies and property chaining and propose how to revise a flaw. These insights can also be used to prevent flaws and to choose the best option, which we demonstrate with the chain pattern for upward and downward distributivity over parthood relations. SubProS and ProChainS were evaluated with several ontologies, which demonstrates that such flaws do exist and can be isolated effectively, and useful suggestions for revisions can be proposed.

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Notes

  1. http://www.co-ode.org/roberts/family-tree.owl; last accessed 12-3-2012.

  2. http://www.ihtsdo.org/our-standards/snomed-ct/.

  3. Note that a cardinality constraint applies to the axiom, not the property, and hence is not considered here.

  4. Two informal, but well-known, sources promoting this representation are: the W3C Best Practices document on Simple Part–Whole relations, http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/OEP/SimplePartWhole/, and the Componency Ontology Design Pattern at http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/wiki/Submissions:Componency.

  5. http://owl.cs.manchester.ac.uk/repository/.

  6. Further, as might be gleaned from (E.11), it is better to have (E.1) the other way around (Protein \(\sqsubseteq \) \(\exists \) hasPart.AminoAcid), because not all amino acids are part of a protein, yet each protein must have some amino acids.

  7. http://obofoundry.org/ro/; last accessed on: 20-12-2012.

  8. This is being updated such that it is integrated with BFO as the impending BFO v2, which diverges from the new relation ontology (http://code.google.com/p/obo-relations/; last accessed on: 20-12-2012) that is tailored to biology and has many object properties.

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Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Melanie Hilario for her feedback on the subject domain and object properties in the DMOP ontology.

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  1. School of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, UKZN/CSIR-Meraka Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa

    C. Maria Keet

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Maria Keet, C. Preventing, Detecting, and Revising Flaws in Object Property Expressions. J Data Semant 3, 189–206 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13740-013-0028-y

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