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Hello Kingsley and friends. I'd like to
open here a clean page in reference of your suggested solution in http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontology-summit/2014-02/msg00117.html#nid09.
I do that since the mailing chain is pretty hard to follow by now.... :) The problem example you state is to reason about the concept 'Organization' over two different (but related) ontologies A and B where a:Ogranization and b:Organization represent close and possibly semantically equivalent concepts. Your solution is to define "integrating ontology" C which imports the two ontologies A and B, and defines the triple [a:Organization owl:equivalentClass b:Organization .], which will now allow to reason with C about this concept as an integration over A and B. Objections to that approach have been that there will be conflicts among A and B that will entangle that reasoning in C and possibly fail it or produce mistakes. I would add to this that this will also add much overhead and inefficiently slow process. Alternative solution suggestion: Lets define a common ontology O in which we have a single concept o:Organization. Now we define "integrating" ontologies AO and BO to bridge A and B with O: AO imports both A and O, and defines the triple [a:Organization owl:equivalentClass o:Organization .] BO imports both B and O, and defines the triple [b:Organization owl:equivalentClass o:Organization .] The bridges work as two separate mediators between A and B to a "common" ontology in which all organizations in A and in B will be a o:Organization rather than a a:Organization or a a:Organization, respectively. How is this useful? It depends on your application: We will build two mediation "networks": one flowing models of A to O1 (a model in ontology O), using the integrating ontology AO, and another from B to O2 (another model in ontology O), using BO. These are like views of the original models. At this point one can work on a federated data-set over the two models O1 and O2, being of the same ontology. That is an analogy to what happens in DBMS where schema play the role of ontologies. The power of the mediation process is in more elaborate examples, where O may be covering many more important concepts than just Organization, and represent a meaningful knowledge about organizations that overlaps A and B (and possibly many more ontologies in this domain). Models in O can be transformed (mediated) from all these ontologies, and what is interesting here: also mediated back to their original ontologies. The "combining" ontology is in our terminology - a "Mediation Rule" ontology. About our problem domain: We deal with interoperability among engineering design tools, where we wish to share models in one tool with models in another tool, with no limit of the umber of tools. So we defined a hierarchy of commonality among ontologies and with the mediation rules ontologies we are able to mediate models between specific tools and models in the common ontology - back and forth. For instance, a model in the SysML language is mediated to a tool implementing the Modelica equations modeling method - and back creating a collaborative process among engineers working on these two very different tools on the same engineering design. So, I suggest to apply the same approach to the problem discussed in this mail thread. For more, see our paper: H. Broodney, U. Shani, A. Sela, “Model Integration – Extracting Value from MBSE,” in MBSE, INCOSE International Symposium 2013, Philadelphia, U.S (best paper): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255720194_Model_Integration__Extracting_Value_from_MBSE Regards, Uri Shani, PhD Research Staff Member SPRINT(lead), DANSE (lead) Projects
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