Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist, 2nd Edition

Inferring Class Relationships

In the previous discussion, most of the inferences we drew were about individuals: Wenger is an Analyst, Jupiter is a Solar Planet, Kaneda is a Star Player, or Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway. In this chapter, we have begun to draw conclusions about classes—for example, JDJG is unsatisfiable. OWL allows us to draw a wide range of conclusions about classes. We can, in some circumstances, infer that one class is a subclass of another or that a class is the domain (or range) of a property. There are countless possibilities for how this can happen, but there are a few common patterns that are worth calling out. We’ll return to our descriptions of baseball teams for examples:

Intersection and subclass: The intersection ...