2011-06-11 | Relations between Ontology Properties

Ontologies are a central instrument for modelling and processing of knowledge by computer systems.
Ontologies describe the domain of concept of a problem area by using classes, objects and properties. Objects are instances of classes. Properties are binary relations combining classes with classes thus providing properties between objects or combining classes with values thus providing properties between objects and values.

A prominent language elaborating these concepts is OWL.  These properties can be of different kinds and specialized so to fulfill certain requirements which are well known from propositional logics. These kinds of properties are defined by the appropriate OMG standard and realized in editing environments as e.g. Protégé.

Handling OWL is quite ambitious and often results in to subtle problems caused by different interpretations of the language specifications.

To get a deeper feeling for these properties and how they can be combined, a graphical representation is often very helpful. In this paper we transmit the logical restrictions induced by the different types of properties and show how this affects their graphical representation. The results of this work are used for ontology modelling and incorporation in the research project OEPI funded by the EU. providers. 

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