Understanding OWL min vs max vs exactly Property Restrictions
The open world assumption trips people up in many ways. In this post we will be looking at how the open world assumption affects the semantics of the property restrictions min
, max
and exactly
.
The example we will use throughout this post is that of a product that may have no price, 1 price, exactly 1 price, or many prices. We will firstly assume a product must have at least 1 price, then that it can have a maximum of 1 price, and finally we will assume that it must have exactly 1 price. We therefore assume that we have a hasPrice
data property that is defined as follows:
DataProperty: hasPrice Range: xsd:decimal
The example ontology can be found on GitHub. To be able to distinguish the different product types having different rules regarding how many prices they have, we will create 3 different classes called ProductWith_Min_1_Price
, ProductWith_Max_1_Price
and ProductWith_Exactly_1_Price
respectively.
Before we look at examples and the semantics of the min
, max
, exactly
property restrictions, let us briefly recall what is meant by the open world assumption.
Open World Assumption versus Closed World Assumption
OWL has been designed with the explicit intention to be able to deal with incomplete information. Consequently, OWL intentionally does not make any assumptions with regards to information that is not known. In particular, no assumption is made about the truth or falsehood of facts that cannot be deduced from the ontology. This approach is known as the open world assumption. This approach is in contrast with the closed world assumption typically used in information systems. With the closed world assumption facts that cannot be deduced from a knowledge base (i.e. database) are implicitly understood as being false [1, 2, 3].
As an example, in a database when a product does not have a price, the general assumption is that the product does not have price. Moreover, in a database if a product has 1 price, the assumption is that the product has only 1 price and no other prices. This in stark contrast to OWL. If an OWL ontology defines a product for which no explicit price is given, the assumption is not that the product has no price. Rather, no assumption is made as to whether the product has a price, has many prices or whether it has no price. Futhermore, if a product has a price, the assumption is not that this is necessarily the only price for that product. Rather, it allows for the possibility that no other price may exist, or that many other prices may exist, which is merely not known. The only information that holds in an ontology is information that is either explicitly stated, or that can be derived form explicit information.
The min
Property Restriction
To define a product that must have at least 1 price we define it as follows:
Class: ProductWith_Min_1_Price SubClassOf: hasPrice min 1 xsd:decimal Individual: productWithoutPrice Types: ProductWith_Min_1_Price
If we now create an individual of type ProductWith_Min_1_Price
, say productWithoutPrice
, which has no price information, we will find that the reasoner will not give an inconsistency. The reason for this is that the reasoner has no information with regards to whether productWithoutPrice
has any price information. Hence, it is possible
that productWithoutPrice
has a price (or prices) that is merely unknown. To make explicit that productWithoutPrice
has no price information, we can define it as follows:
Individual: productWithoutPrice Types: ProductWith_Min_1_Price, hasPrice max 0 xsd:decimal
This revised definition of productWithoutPrice
will now result in the reasoner detecting an inconsistency. However, note that ProductWith_Min_1_Price
allows for products
that have more than 1 price. Hence, the following will not result in an inconsistency.
Individual: productWithManyPrices Types: ProductWith_Min_1_Price Facts: hasPrice 2.5, hasPrice 3.25
The max
Property Restriction
To define a product that cannot have more than 1 price, we can define it as
follows:
Class: ProductWith_Max_1_Price SubClassOf: hasPrice max 1 xsd:decimal
If we now define an individual productWithMoreThan1Price
with more than 1 price (as shown in the example below), the reasoner will detect an inconsistency.
Individual: productWithMoreThan1Price Types: ProductWith_Max_1_Price Facts: hasPrice 2.5, hasPrice 3.25
Note that individuals of type ProductWith_Max_1_Price
can also have no price information without resulting in the reasoner giving an inconsistency. I.e., if we define the individual productWithoutPrice
as
Individual: productWithoutPrice Types: ProductWith_Max_1_Price, hasPrice max 0 xsd:decimal
it will not give an inconsistency.
The exactly
Property Restriction
Let us now define ProductWith_Exactly_1_Price
with the individual productWithExactly1Price
as follows:
Class: ProductWith_Exactly_1_Price SubClassOf: hasPrice exactly 1 xsd:decimal Individual: productWithExactly1Price Types: ProductWith_Exactly_1_Price Facts: hasPrice 7.1
The exactly property is essentially syntactical shorthand for specifying both the min and max restrictions using the same cardinality. Thus, we could just as well have defined ProductWith_Exactly_1_Price
as:
Class: ProductWith_Exactly_1_Price SubClassOf: hasPrice min 1 xsd:decimal, hasPrice max 1 xsd:decimal
or, given the classes we have already defined in the ontology, we can define it as:
Class: ProductWith_Exactly_1_Price SubClassOf: ProductWith_Max_1_Price, ProductWith_Min_1_Price
Prefer exactly
Given that the exactly property restriction is syntactical sugar, should we prefer using the combination of min and max directly as shown above? My answer to this is no. My motivation for this is that the semantics of exactly
is only equivalent to the intersection of min
and max
if the cardinalities are the same and the data/object types are the same. As such specifying
Class: ProductWith_Exactly_1_Price SubClassOf: hasPrice exactly 1 xsd:decimal
has less opportunities for mistakes than specifying
Class: ProductWith_Exactly_1_Price SubClassOf: hasPrice min 1 xsd:decimal, hasPrice max 1 xsd:decimal
Conclusion
In this post we looked at some of the ways in which the min
, max
and exactly
property restrictions can trip people up due to the open world assumption. Please feel free to leave a comment if you have questions or suggestions about this post.
References
1. F. Baader and W. Nutt, Basic Description Logics, The Description Logic Handbook: Theory, Implementation and Applications (F. Baader, D. Calvanese, D. L. McGuinness, D. Nardi, and P. Patel-Schneider, eds.), Cambridge University Press, New York, USA, 2007, pp. 45–104.
2. M. Krötzsch, F. Simančı́k, and I. Horrocks, A Description Logic Primer, Computing Research Repository (CoRR) abs/1201.4089 (2012).
3. S. Rudolph, Foundations of Description Logics, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Reasoning Web: Semantic Technologies for the Web of Data (A. Polleres, C. d’Amato, M. Arenas, S. Handschuh, P. Kroner, S. Ossowski, and P. F. Patel-Schneider, eds.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 6848, Springer, 2011, pp. 76–136.
Getting started with Ontotext GraphDB and Jena
In my previous post I explained how you can create an GraphDB repository and how you can update and query your repository using RDF4J. In this post I provide an example of how you can update and query a GraphDB repository using Jena. However, even though the code works, there are some pitfalls.
A Quick Example
First you need to add Jena as a Maven dependency:
<dependency> <groupId>org.apache.jena</groupId> <artifactId>apache-jena-libs</artifactId> <version>3.7.0</version> <type>pom</type> </dependency>
The Java code is straightforward:
package org.graphdb.jena.tutorial; import org.apache.jena.query.QueryExecution; import org.apache.jena.query.QueryExecutionFactory; import org.apache.jena.query.QuerySolution; import org.apache.jena.query.ResultSet; import org.apache.jena.update.UpdateExecutionFactory; import org.apache.jena.update.UpdateFactory; import org.apache.jena.update.UpdateProcessor; import org.apache.jena.update.UpdateRequest; import org.slf4j.Logger; import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory; import org.slf4j.Marker; import org.slf4j.MarkerFactory; public class SimpleInsertQueryExample { private static Logger logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger(SimpleInsertQueryExample.class); // Why This Failure marker private static final Marker WTF_MARKER = MarkerFactory.getMarker("WTF"); // GraphDB private static final String PERSONDATA_REPO_QUERY = "http://localhost:7200/repositories/PersonData"; private static final String PERSONDATA_REPO_UPDATE = "http://localhost:7200/repositories/PersonData/statements"; private static String strInsert; private static String strQuery; static { strInsert = "INSERT DATA {" + "<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Grace_Hopper> " + "<http://dbpedia.org/ontology/birthDate>" + " \"1906-12-09\"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#date> ." + "<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Grace_Hopper> " + "<http://dbpedia.org/ontology/birthPlace> " + "<http://dbpedia.org/resource/New_York_City> ." + "<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Grace_Hopper> " + "<http://dbpedia.org/ontology/deathDate>" + " \"1992-01-01\"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#date> ." + "<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Grace_Hopper> " + "<http://dbpedia.org/ontology/deathPlace> " + "<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Arlington_County,_Virginia> ." + "<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Grace_Hopper> " + "<http://purl.org/dc/terms/description>" + " \"American computer scientist and United States Navy officer.\" ." + "<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Grace_Hopper> " + "<http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type> " + "<http://dbpedia.org/ontology/Person> ." + "<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Grace_Hopper> " + "<http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/gender> \"female\" ." + "<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Grace_Hopper> " + "<http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/givenName> \"Grace\" ." + "<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Grace_Hopper> " + "<http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/name> \"Grace Hopper\" ." + "<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Grace_Hopper>" + " <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/surname> \"Hopper\" ." + "}"; strQuery = "SELECT ?name WHERE {?s <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/name> ?name .}"; } private static void insert() { UpdateRequest updateRequest = UpdateFactory.create(strInsert); UpdateProcessor updateProcessor = UpdateExecutionFactory .createRemote(updateRequest, PERSONDATA_REPO_UPDATE); updateProcessor.execute(); } private static void query() { QueryExecution queryExecution = QueryExecutionFactory .sparqlService(PERSONDATA_REPO_QUERY, strQuery); for (ResultSet results = queryExecution.execSelect(); results.hasNext();) { QuerySolution qs = results.next(); String strName = qs.get("?name").toString(); logger.trace("name = " + strName); } queryExecution.close(); } public static void main(String[] args) { try { insert(); query(); } catch (Throwable t) { logger.error(WTF_MARKER, t.getMessage(), t); } } }
Some Pitfalls
The example I provided will insert RDF data into GraphDB and query it successfully. However, the data is inserted into the repository in the absence of a transaction. The transaction API of Jena is based on a Dataset
. Historically Ontotext provided a Jena adapter with which a Jena Dataset
could be created. However, based on my question on Stack Overflow in this regard, the Jena adapter is no longer supported by Ontotext. Hence, currently it is not clear to me how to enable transactions when using Jena to access GraphDB. So, if you know how to address this, please be so kind as to leave a comment with your insight!
Conclusion
In this post I provided a quick example of how you can access GraphDB using Jena. However, this example does not support transactions, and therefore you may want to look at rather using RDF4J with GraphDB. You can find this code at github.