How to model a class that is a collection of individuals of another class in Protege

Question

I need to model following example in Protege:

Suppose I have a class, Pride, which represents a collection of instances of another class, Lion. Is there any other way to do this without use of user defined object property with minimum cardinality?

Furthermore, if a lion has color "Yellow" and is a member of a pride, then the reasoner should infer that the pride has color "Yellow". Is there any other to do this without defining a set of SWRL rules ?

Answer 1

Is there any other way to do this without use of user defined object property with minimum cardinality?

You will need to define some sort of membership property. It can be generic (eg, hasMember ), or more specific to the particular type (eg, hasLion ), but you'll need to define something to relate the collection to its instances. You do not required to use any cardinality axioms here, though you might want to say something like (Pride ⊑ ≥ hasMember 2).

Furthermore, if a lion has color "Yellow" and is a member of a pride, then the reasoner should infer that the pride has color "Yellow". Is there any other to do this without defining a set of SWRL rules ?

To make the properties of the members transfer to the collection, you don't have to use SWRL rules. You can use subproperty chain axioms. (You will need to do this for each property that you want to transfer over, though.) For instance, to express the fact that:

If a lion has color X and is a member of pride, then the pride has color X.

You can use the axiom:

hasMember • hasColor ⊑ hasColor

That means that whenever you have data like:

P → _hasMember L → _hasColor C

you can infer

P → _hasColor C

For more on how that works, see Using Property Chains to get inferred Knowledge in an OWL Ontology(Protege) .