问题
In my ontology I have individuals "pic Joan" which is an instance of concept "mountain" and "port Cerbère" which is an instance of concept "village". I have the relation "dominates" going from "pic Joan" to "port Cerbère" (in the sense that the mountain is perceived as being close and above the village, and hence "dominates it").
But in fact, I need to represent the information "pic Joan dominates port Cerbère at a distance of 1.5 miles NW".
So, logically, I would need to attach to the relation "dominates" the data properties "distance=1.5M", "direction=NW".
But, AFAIK, OWL does not provide properties for relations. I know that I can define range and domain for relations, but this is not about range and domain, the same relation will have different property values when taken between different instances.
How would you represent this information in OWL?
(Auxiliary question: is there some other ontology formalism where I can define properties for relations? And if yes, are there tools like Protégé to manage ontologies in that formalism?)
回答1:
The most common pattern for this use case is to introduce a new class, say RelativePosition:
RelativePosition a Class.
relationType a DataProperty.
relationType domain RelativePosition.
// relationType values not specified here: might be "dominant","overlooking"...
// depending on your needs, this might need more structure.
firstFeature a ObjectProperty.
firstFeature domain RelativePosition.
secondFeature a ObjectProperty.
secondFeature domain RelativePosition.
// both properties can appear multiple times for one instance of RelativePosition
// to group sets of entities which share a relative position
More properties can be added to introduce distance, or other characteristics.
Edit: copied link from Joshua's comment below: for n-ary relations, see here
回答2:
is there some other ontology formalism where I can define properties for relations?
Have you looked into Topic Maps?
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22120071/how-do-i-define-relation-properties-in-owl