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Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Do OWL Classes Inherit Properties?

I'm slowly learning about using Semantic Web technologies. Sadly, I'm trying to do this in a rather ad hoc, as needed way, so my understanding is far from complete. I just ran across this interesting question: does an ontology subclass inherit the properties of its superclass?

Searching the web for opinions on this topic leads to a couple of contradictory views:

http://www.semanticoverflow.com/questions/619/rdfs-owl-inheritance-with-josekipellet
The answer to this question says: "Instances of subClasses do not inherit properties from instances of parent classes".

http://eclectic-tech.blogspot.com/2010/05/semantic-web-introduction-part-3-rdf.html
This states "In the example below, Penicillin is declared to be a sub class of both Antibiotic and USRegulatedMedication.It will therefore inherit the properties of those classes."

So, I turned to the W3C RDF Schema Recommendation, to see whether the definition would shed any light.

http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/#ch_subclassof
"The property rdfs:subClassOf is an instance of rdf:Property that is used to state that all the instances of one class are instances of another."

This reads to me that when C1 rdfs:subClassOf C2 then anything that is a C1 is also a C2.So, that seems to directly support the notion that C1 inherits all the properties of C2.

Certainly, if rdf:subClassOf doesn't mean that a subClass inherits the properties of the parent, then what does it mean? That it is unclear is a bit worrying, though.

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