Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist, 2nd Edition

Inference in the Semantic Web

To make our data seem more connected and consistently integrated, we must be able to add relationships into the data that will constrain how the data are viewed. We want to be able to express the relationship between “Henleys” and “Shirts” that will tell us that any item in the “Henleys” category should also be in the “Shirts” category. We want to express the fact about locations that says that if a hotel chain has a hotel at a particular location, then that location is served by a hotel in that chain. We want to express the list of planets in terms of the classifications of the various bodies in the solar system.

Many of these relationships are familiar to information modelers in many paradigms. Let’s take the relationship ...