Natalia, You should look at SHACL since it is a W3C standard. Essentially, SHACL is SPIN 2.0.
As for your question, it does not seem to be related to formalisms, but rather to the tool support that is or could be built around it. SPIN and SHACL are based on RDF and reason over data in RDF. One advantage of SHACL and SPIN over SWRL is that it is SPARQL-based. Thus, it can (in principle) "work in place” for any data store that has SPARQL support. If data is not in such store, there are two options: 1. Data is converted to RDF for reasoning. Depending on the context of required data processing, this may or may not be viable. TopBraid platform provides a number of connectors/convertors from various sources to RDF. 2. Rules expressed in SHACL/SPIN (for the purpose of this discussion I am referring to both constraints and rules as rules) are translated into some other syntax that an engine that can operate natively over the target data would understand. For a relational database, this may be a set of SQL queries. > On Oct 21, 2017, at 2:43 PM, [email protected] wrote: > > 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] > <mailto:[email protected]>. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout > <https://groups.google.com/d/optout>. -- 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.
