[DL] Granularity of concepts / types in DL?

Gerhard Austaller gerhard at tk.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de
Thu May 15 06:04:32 CEST 2008


Hi

I am developing an ontology with Protégé in OWL-DL but write it down in DL. I have some questions that nobody was able to answer so far...

The first one is: Is there something like a type system in DL? Or is this irrelevant? Further, what's the right granularity of a concept?

Let me give an example to make my point clear. I model that a house has an address. Can address now be a concept without further refinement and be written like 

"Main Street 4, A-543566 Luna City": Address 

or has it to be refined with further roles like hasStreetname, hasStreetnumber, hasZip... until every "range" is only a "simple" type like String for Streetname and Integer for Streetnumber.

This leads to my second question: My I use self-defined complex types as range in OWL-DL? I'd like to use it, when I only need a container to store data without the need to model relations... Example again is my address. I'd like to have a complex type address as range of a datatype property.

My last question is about individuals. E.g. I have concepts Man and Woman and I have individuals Gerhard:Man and Marry:Woman. My question now is what exactly "Gerhard" and "Marry" express in these examples. Are they just unique "identifiers" without any further semantics or information, or are they kind of "value". 

Hope my questions are clear and somebody could answer them.
Thanks in advance
Gerhard



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