Andrea Westerinen wrote:
>
In a recent project, I used the equivalentClass OWL semantic to do this. For example, in a Person ontology, I defined the Person concept with its relevant properties.
When it came to the Person's Location - that was just an under-specified (i.e., empty) Location class. I then found a Location ontology, developed by another group, and opted to use that. Lastly, I defined an "integrating" ontology that imported the Person
and Location ontologies, and specified an equivalence between the relevant concepts. So, PersonNamespace:Location was defined as an equivalentClass to LocationNamespace:Location. Obviously, the application covered up all this for the users, and my triple
store (with reasoner) handled the rest.
In my view, this is exactly the kind of thing OWL:equivalentClasses was intended to enable, and it is absolutely necessary to this kind of reuse.
-Ed
--
Edward J. Barkmeyer Email: edbark@xxxxxxxx
National Institute of Standards & Technology
Systems Integration Division
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