In this post we will look at how different types of inheritance can be translated to OWL. We consider the case where Person
is specialized by Employee
and Client
(Fig. 1). In a UML class diagram if inheritance is not annotated the default annotation {incomplete, disjoint}
is assumed. incomplete
means there are instances of Person
which are neither of type Employee
nor Client
. disjoint
means there is no instance of Person
that is both of type Employee
and of type Client
. The set representation is given in Fig. 2 and the OWL translation in Fig. 3.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3
The annotation {complete, disjoint}
means every instance of Person
is either a instance of Employee
or an instance of Client
(Fig. 4). The corresponding Venn diagram is given in Fig. 5 and the OWL translation in Fig. 6.

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

Fig. 6
When overlapping
is used rather than disjoint
it means an instance of Person
may be both of type Employee
and of type Client
. Fig. 7 – 9 provides a UML class diagram, Venn diagram and OWL translation as example for the annotation {incomplete, overlapping}
. Fig. 10 – 12 provides a UML class diagram, Venn diagram and OWL translation as example for the annotation {complete, overlapping}
.

Fig. 7

Fig. 8

Fig. 9

Fig. 10

Fig. 11

Fig. 12