I tend to agree. In fact, when developing an ontology's taxonomic backbone, I
would try to adhere to Guarino and Welty's OntoClean methodology (now merged
with Methontology): see the article (01)
Guarino, Nicola and Chris Welty. 2002. Evaluating Ontological Decisions with
OntoClean. Communications of the ACM. 45(2):61-65. New York:ACM Press. (02)
Or better: (03)
Welty, Chris and Nicola Guarino. 2001. Support for Ontological Analysis of
Taxonomic Relationships. J. Data and Knowledge Engineering. 39(1):51-74.
October, 2001. (04)
They use meta-properties like unity, identity, rigidity, etc. I think your
notion of transience would be a -Rigid value. (05)
Also, note that in general we use the term relation or property, rather than
association. Frame-based KR systems call this a "slot" (the OKBC that Protege is
based on is a frame-based system). (06)
Leo (07)
Dean Black wrote: (08)
> I would tend to model both Buyer and Seller as the names of associations
> that exist between an Order instance and two Parties (I'm introducing a
> commonly used superclass of Organization/Individual). So an Order (in this
> simplistic example) would have an association to Party called Buyer, and a
> second association to Party called Seller.
>
> In protege, I think this is modeled by creating two slots in the Order
> class, one named Buyer, the second Seller, and then declaring each of those
> slots to have a Value Type of CLASS. When you declare a slot to be of type
> class, then you also provide the class (or classes) that are allowed to fill
> that slot. In this case it would be PARTY for each of the two slots.
>
> Of course, my explanation is based upon downloading Protege for the first
> time last night and playing with it for an hour or so, so I'm pretty much
> going out on a limb here. Is this how you real Protege experts would model
> this, or is there a more appropriate way?
>
> I don't see Buyer as a subclass (or interface) of Party (or another class),
> because Buyer is a totally transient notion, a role as you pointed out, and
> a class hierarchy in an ontology (I believe) should be trying to model more
> permanent notions. For example, a Zebra is always permanently a Mammal, and
> it doesn't transition or morph from being one species to another, therefore
> it would be a legitimate subclass of Mammal in an ontology. (Hope I'm
> making a clear and understandable distinction between "permanent" and
> "transient" states of being.)
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of MDaconta@xxxxxxx
> Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2003 10:10 PM
> To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Roles in the UBL Trading Cycle
>
> Hi All,
>
> In beginning to look at the UBL op70 library some classes
> quickly become apparent for the basic business scenario of
> purchasing a product.
>
> Invoice
> Order
> Product
> Buyer
> Seller
>
> Of course, Invoice and Order are artifacts of this purchase transaction.
> Thus maybe they should be subclasses of Artifact (or possibly subclasses
> of Document which is a subclass of Artifact ...).
>
> The last two gave me pause because buyer and seller are actually
> a role that an Organization or Individual takes on when being a party to
> this transaction. This brings me to the question: is it better to model
> buyer and seller as a Role (or interface) than as a subclass of
> Person or Organization? Of course, UML has a notion of Interface but
> I do not believe protege nor RDFS supports the notion of an interface or
> role.
>
> Which in turn leads us to the question of what are the semantics behind
> the notion of a Role in a data model (ontology) that does not touch upon
> behavior?
>
> - Mike
> -------------------------------
> Michael C. Daconta
> Chief Scientist, Advanced Programs Group
> McDonald Bradley, Inc.
> www.daconta.net
>
> _________________________________________________________________
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--
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Dr. Leo Obrst The MITRE Corporation
mailto:lobrst@xxxxxxxxx Intelligent Information Management/Exploitation
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