Simplified Approach for Representing Part-Whole Relations in OWL-DL Ontologies

The correct representation of hierarchy in ontologies is a crucial requirement to infer the true knowledge. OWL is a widely used language for building web ontologies. However to represent partonomic relations, unlike the generalization-based taxonomy (is-a relations), OWL does not provide any built-in primitives neither a straight-forward procedure for part-whole relations [1]. However, although, OWL-DL contains sufficient power to describe such relations, it still requires extra work to make full use of this power. The current approach (best practices recommended by w3.org) uses that power through manual implementations of the underlying steps, which could introduce an error-prone process and may cause confusion in some cases. In this paper, we propose a simplified approach to represent part-whole relations in a similar way to subClassOf. Our method utilizes OWL-DL´s power through automated generation of the relation´s restrictions. We make use of OWL´s annotation properties to capture the relations constraints, then apply our method to automatically generate the equivalent OWL-DL representations. The evaluation of our representation shows that the classification results and the inferred model (safe reasoning) are the same as those of the current standard approach described in [1].