Hello, I am evaluating ontologies as knowledge representations of clinical knowledge, where temporal reasoning is a must. I am examining both SWRL and SPIN formalisms as a way to increment the expressivity of an ontology. In the case of SWRL I have already taken a look to what is available and have some preliminary conclusión. Now I'd like to understand if SPIN/TopBraid provides functions for temporal reasoning. If not at this stage, are there plans to do so?
In my opinion ontologies are really good for holding terminological knowledge (the axioms or "universal truths"), but not so good for holding or maintaining lots of instances in the A-box. For example: in SWRL the solution for temporal reasoning is to import in your ontology a temporal ontology that allows asserting temporal facts in the A-box and then using a built-in library from SWRL to define rules and reason over temporal information. However this seems to me not a practical solution as all those temporal facts are already available in external data sources and it does not make sense to move all that information from a hospital system's DB into an ontology A-box (think of performance for example, or the difficulty of moving data from existing transactional hospital systems into an ontology structure.) This leads me to the following question regarding TopBraid and SPIN: is it possible to infer new knowledge using an hybrid approach, that is, combining the knowledge expressed in the T-box of the ontology and the "virtual A-box" facts stated in an external database system (let's say a Hospital Information System)?. If not, are there any plans of going in that direction? I ask this because ontologies and semantic web are still very much an academic discipline, but its use is not so widespread in the industry. It seems to me that one of the success factors would be allowing a reasoner to combine expert knowledge expressed in the ontology T.box with real-world data expressed in an external DB through the use of some mapping mechanism (for example entities could be mapped to the T-box classes and data properties to columns). I would very much appreciate any comment on these issues. Thanks in advance. Best regards, Natalia -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TopBraid Suite Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
