OWL中的子组和超组（类/子类）关系

Question

I need some help regarding OWL syntax. I have a synthetic population class called 'Person'. Person contains population information, and PersonWithinAdminRegion is another class represents subgroup of person class. For example 'Person' class contains information about all persons in the USA. FloridaPerson or MiamiPerson can be an example of PersonWithinAdminRegion. Basically, PersonWithinAdminRegion is a subgroup of supergroup Person. It not sub-class because sub-class inherits properties of super-class and add some more. It is not the case in my situation. My question is how to show sub-group of a super-group in OWL syntax?

Person a owl:Class.
PersonWithinAdminRegion ? ?

Answer 1

There is no inheritance in OWL. Therefore no properties are inherited by subclasses. The subclass hierarchy is a type of subsumption hierarchy with only one semantic: a member of a subclass is a member of the (super) class. An example:

:Person a owl:Class .
:PersonWithinAdminRegion a owl:Class .
:PersonWithinAdminRegion rdfs:subClassOf :Person .
:FloridaPerson a :PersonWithinAdminRegion .

From this, one can infer:

:FloridaPerson a :Person .

And that is all. No other properties or values will be inferred. Eg RDFS and OWL semantics are more like set theory (classification) than object-oriented class definition.

So it seems the above will get you the semantics that you want. If you wanted to go deeper into the subsumption hierarchy, let's say:

:PersonInFloridaRegion rdfs:subClassOf :PersonWithinAdminRegion .
:p1 a :PersonInFloridaRegion .

...then you will be able to infer:

:p1 a :PersonWithinAdminRegion .
:p1 a :Person .

...and so on.

Answer 2

Even though I am still not sure of your modelling perspective, and whether there are some properties that Person has, but PersonWithinAdminRegion , doesn't. Here is an idea for solution.

You can create a generic class Person , and a subclass of it USAPerson , then a PersonWithinAdminRegion , which is a subclass of Persons as well and a sibling of PersonWithinAdminRegion . Thus:

1. Both USAPerosn and PersonWithinAdminRegion are Person ;
2. Persons will include USAPersons , so when make a subset of Person you can still have the control over USAPerosn ;

3. PersonWithinAdminRegion can still not have properties that USAPerson have.

    Person a owl:Class USAPerson a owl:Class PersonWithinAdminRegion a owl:Class USAPerson rdfs:subClassOf Peron PersonWithinAdminRegion rdfs:subClassOf Peron 

Hope this helps.