In OWL/DL, it is possible to have a property/role that is a Sub[Object/Data]PropertyOf/subrole of more than one property/role, but I never found a motivating example in the W3C OWL documentation or in DL papers.
Do you know of any published OWL ontologies or DL paper that includes such a motivating example that I have missed (examples of your own are welcome in comments) ?
This might be too broad of a question, but it's easy to think of properties that have multiple superproperties.
After all, that p is a subproperty of q just means that "x p y" implies "x q y". So all you need is some kind of relationship that simultaneously implies two different kinds of relationships:
hasSon ⊑ hasMaleRelative, hasDescendant
This makes sense, since having a son X implies having X as a male relative, and having X as a descendant, but it's not the case that either
hasMaleRelative ⊑ hasDescendant
or
hasDescendant ⊑ hasMaleRelative
That might not be a particularly motivating example, but it's simple and clear. Any time you a single property implies at least two others, you've got a property with multiple super properties.
Note also that because subPropertyOf is transitive, as soon as you have a multi-level hierarchy, you have multiple super properties. E.g.,
p
|
+- q
|
+- r
r has both q and p as super-properties.
One important reason for declaring multiple superproperties of a property is in matching different ontologies. For instance, if you're defining an ontology where text can be associated with some resource, you might want to relate your ontology with both the RDFS vocabulary and with Dublin Core. As a result, you might end up with
ex:myNote rdfs:subPropertyOf rdfs:comment, dc:description