Publication
X-Protege: An Ontology Editor for Defining Cartesian Types to Represent n-ary Relations.
Christian Willms; Hans-Ulrich Krieger; Bernd Kiefer
In: Joint Second Workshop on Language and Ontology & Terminology and Knowledge Structures. Workshop on Language and Ontology (LangOnto-2016), located at 10th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 2016, May 23-28, Portoroz, Slovenia, ELDA, 5/2016.
Abstract
Arbitrary n-ary relations (n >= 1) can, in principle, be
realized through binary relations obtained by a reification process
which introduces new individuals to which the additional arguments
are linked via ``accessor'' properties.
Modern ontologies which employ standards such as RDF and OWL have
mostly obeyed this restriction, but have struggled with it
nevertheless.
In Krieger & Willms (2015), we have laid the foundations
for a theory-agnostic extension of RDFS and OWL and have
implemented in the last year an extension of Protege, called X-Protege,
which supports the definition of Cartesian types to represent n-ary
relations and relation instances.
Not only do we keep the distinction between the domain and the range
of an n-ary relation, but also introduce so-called extra
arguments which can be seen as position-oriented unnamed annotation
properties and which are accessible to entailment rules.
As the direct representation of n-ary relations abolishes RDF
triples, we have backed up X-Protege by the semantic repository and
entailment engine HFC which supports tuples of arbitrary length.
X-Protege is programmed in Java and is made available under the Mozilla
Public License.