As long as there are only declaration of individuals and classes it's more or less simply removing the old triple and add the new one.
But, once those entities are used in other OWL axioms, it's not that simple and depends on the ontology. For example 1. How to convert subClassOf relationships between classes when converting to individuals? 2. How to handle relationships between individuals when converting to classes? And this are just the most basic axioms. I don't see any automatic approach. > Hi there > > A general question: are there (implemented) operations of conversions in > OWL-DL of: > > > 1. An individual into a class > > 2. A class into an individual > > If so, what are they called? Could you direct me to relevant references in > the literature describing these operations? > > My hunch at the moment is that in Protégé 1. and 2. above would be > refactoring operations, although in the Refactoring Menu I can't see any > obvious options that would suggest 1. or 2.. > > More generally I would think that the following terminology may have been > used for such operations: > > > a. Abstraction or Conceptualization > Vs. Vs. > > b. Concretization or Reification > > > ( Note that reification would normally be applied to relations/properties > rather than classes. Then again, if a class can be considered as a 1-ary > relation (can it?), one could reify a class as well ) > > Thanks, Jos > > -- Lorenz Bühmann AKSW group, University of Leipzig Group: http://aksw.org - semantic web research center
