SHACL has all the capabilities of SPIN plus some additional features. Unlike SWRL and SPIN it is also a W3C standard. Given that you are making your assessment now, it would make sense to look at SHACL.
There isn’t yet anything in SHACL specifically targeted for temporal reasoning, but SHACL is extensible. You can define your own functions and shapes and it supports JavaScript along with SPARQL. Thus, it has practically limitless processing/reasoning capabilities. With any kind of a “rule engine”, there are design questions and considerations about how it may be integrated with external data sources. Different answers suit different situations. For example, some rules (those involving graph traversal) are just not practical to be executed in place over relational data. But some other rules may be executed very efficiently. Rule engines may employ certain sequencing/chaining algorithms for which they must populate data into their own storage. Further, when new facts are inferred, storage must be flexible enough to accommodate them, etc. I don’t think there is anything unique in this respect concerning rule engines that use RDF as their native data representation. > On Oct 23, 2017, at 2:28 PM, [email protected] wrote: > > Hi Irene > You are right, it is not about the formalism itself, but about its tool > ecosystem. I am evaluating the formalisms and all the criteria that need to > be present to reason over clinical guidelines > Regarding SHACL: I have read about it but thought did not have support for > temporal reasoning either. Does it? > > I understand that the way to do it is move data to RDF from other data sets, > but it is a lot of work and a lot of data, especially in the medical > domain..Anyway I'll take a quick closer look to SHACL > > Thanks and best regards, > Natalia > > > El sábado, 21 de octubre de 2017, 20:43:56 (UTC+2), [email protected] > escribió: > 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.
