Question

I am trying to construct an ontology in protege. However, I was wondering how to represent the following in OWL XML:

A hospital consists of various departments, wards, and the central administration

Its a bit strange that I can construct the hardest of ontologies but i just can’t solve this.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

S.

Answer 1

You need to be clear what you mean by “consists of” – i.e. precisely which relationship does that denote? It sounds like some kind of partonomy, but you could mean the organizational relationships, financial, reporting or the relationships of the physical spaces. Once you’ve decided that, ideally you would re-use an existing ontology for that precise relationship, if you can find one.

Assume that whatever relationship you really want is denoted by ex:contains. Then a hospital is in the class of thing that contains at least one department, at least one ward, and exactly one central administration. If you are working with OWL 2, this is easy with qualified cardinality restrictions. In OWL 1, I guess you’ll have to define a sub-property of ex:contains to denote the various containees: ex:containsDepartment etc, then use a plain non-qualified cardinality restriction.

Once you’ve specified the cardinality restrictions for the various classes of things which contain departments, things which contain wards, etc, then your Hospital class is a sub-class of the intersection of those.