Abel NGO Core Entities Ontology 1.0.2 - Role Classes, SPARQL, and SWRL

Summary

The Abel NGO Core Ontologies, as of revision 1.0.2, are now defining a class Role -- dellimited with subclasses, Foundry Role, Leadership Role, and Membership Role -- for purpose of defining concepts of a role as a first-class object, within an ontology data model.  Those classes are defined within the Abel NGO Core Entities ontology (v1.0.2).

An additional ontology is defined, for purpose of reviewing the data model as defined in the Abel  NGO Core Entities ontology: entity-test.rdf (v1.0.2). The following illustrates a SPARQL query conducted onto the data model of entity-test.rdf (v1.0.2)

SPARQL Query

PREFIX rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
PREFIX owl: <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#>
PREFIX xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#>
PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
PREFIX ent: <http://abel-ngo.github.io/km/rdf/entity.rdf#>
SELECT  ?entity ?role ?s
  WHERE { ?entity rdf:type ent:Tribe .
          ?entity ent:constRole ?role .
          ?s ent:fulfillsRole ?role .
}

SWRL Rules and Inference

Corresponding to the addition of Role classes to the Abel NGO Core Entities Ontology (v1.0.2), the same ontology now defines a set of deduction rules in SWRL. In summary, onto the namespace of the Abel NGO Core Entities Ontology.

Provided:

• Social Entity A is defined as an instance of Social Entity, or any subclasses thereof.
• Role B is defined as an instance of a class Membership Role, or any subclasses thereof
• Entity C is defined as an instance of Entity, or any subclasses thereof
• Role B is denoted as a role constituted by Entity A  (i.e B constBy A, or conversely: A constRole B)
• Role B is denoted as a role fulfilled by Entity C (i.e B fulfilledBy C, or conversely: C fullfilsRole B)

Due to the definition of the same SWRL deduction rules, it would be inferred:

• Entity C is a member of Social Entity A, i.e C memberOf A

In this model, the concept of a role is defined of a first order class, Role. This may serve to draw a conceptual distinction between entity and role. Furthermore, the construction of the data model, as such, would allow for that a SPARQL query may be constructed so to search for a particular class of role, within the ontology data model.

The matter of the deductive inference onto the memberOf property might be considered as it being a matter intended mostly for convenience in presentation of entities and roles. 

The Abel NGO Core Entities ontology v1.0.2 with its component SWRL rules has been tested in the HermiT 1.3.8 inference engine, in Protege 5.0. The SWRL rules were defined originally with Protege 3.5.