How to create multiple relations with same object property?

Question

I am using protege 5 for developing ontology. I have created has_composition as object property. In my ontology the same object_property is used for different domains and their respective range, like has_composition of A is B and has_composition of C and D is E and F.

How can I model this mapping??

Answer 1

OWL (Ontology Web Language, the ontology that defines ontologies) does not allow to model what you're trying to do.

A workaround I can think of is to use sub-properties. Imagine the following classes:

• Pizza
• TomatoSauce
• ChocolateCake
• Chocolate

If you want to define relations such as

• A Pizza has_composition TomatoSauce, and
• A ChocolateCake has_composition Chocolate

then define the following relations:

• has_composition: No domain nor range (or a common superclass such as Dish and Ingredient for example)
  • has_tomato_sauce: Domain Pizza, range TomatoSauce
  • has_chocolate: Domain ChocolateCake, range Chocolate

This will allow the reasoner (the software that computes inferences) to infer that if something has_chocolate a_chocolate, then

• something rdf:type Chocolate (inferred by the domain of has_chocolate);
• something has_composition a_chocolate (because has_chocolate is a sub-property of has_composition).

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You can check out this example in this Gist I made.

Download it, open it, and start the reasoner. You will see the inferred statements in yellow.