Where to start (was: Ontology for Dummies)

[Tony Linde]

I found Sean's complicated example very interesting. And I'm going to go
back to my ontology-based querying topic...

Both of the classes below could be represented (in a complicated way) as
SQL queries. Can we do the reverse then and represent queries as classes
and then use the inference engine to deduce when one query is a subclass
or superclass of another to make inferences about the actual or
potential results. 

And, to bring in the discussion on another topic (though I've not had
time yet to read the related stack of papers on my desk), could we
therefore define 'distance' between queries and make inferences from the
distances.

Cheers,
Tony. 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-semantics at us-vo.org 
> [mailto:owner-semantics at us-vo.org] On Behalf Of Sean Bechhofer
> Sent: 04 October 2002 14:19
> To: Bernard Vatant
> Cc: semantics at us-vo.org
> Subject: Re: Where to start (was: Ontology for Dummies)
...
> As a more complicated example (which is again, I'm afraid, 
> non-astronomical), consider the class of people who have a 
> son and all of who's children are Lawyers. In OWL, I'd say 
> something like:
> 
> PersonWithSonAndAllLawyerChildren =
>  Person AND
>  all child Lawyer
>  some child Male
> 
> How would I represent this information using TMs? And how do 
> I then ensure that I can tell that the class:
> 
> PersonWithSonAndDaughterBothLawyers =
>   Person AND
>   exact 2 child
>   some child (Male AND Lawyer)
>   some child (Female AND Lawyer)
> 
> is a subclass of the first one, e.g. any instances of 
> PersonWithSonAndDaughterBothLawyers are necessarily instances 
> of PersonsWithSonAndLawyerChildren (which then allows me to 
> do things like induce a taxonomy from my definitions).
...