INFS3101/7100 Ontology and the Semantic Web

Exercises from Week 11

For discussion in tutorial week 12

Key concepts from lecture: Widely-used structural features include: countable/ bulk classes, concept/representation classes, dimension systems, mereological structures, metaproperties and extent-descriptive metaclasses. All can be modelled using packages in OWL.

1.     Consider the rental accommodation exchange from the week 2 tutorial and the representation in the solution to the week 4 tutorial and following, as represented in RDFS/OWL in the last tutorials.

a.      Describe examples of bulk classes in the ontology.

b.     Find situations where the concept/ representation class distinction is useful. (Make plausible extensions if necessary).

c.      Find deep part/whole structures (with more than one level of part), and describe them using the formal taxonomy of the lecture. (The property holdings of a particular owner might be a good candidate.)

d.      Find examples of the metaproperties +unity, +identity +rigid, +essential. Model them using the n-ary association method from the lecture.

e.      Find situations in this ontology where various kinds of extent-descriptive metaclasses might be useful, and describe how in each case. Model them.