Hi Lorenz, Emna You're propobably right about the feasibility of automatic solutions.
I have found references though under the general heading "meta-modeling", which provide various modeling solutions to represent a class as an individual of a meta-ontology of choice. In this context they (informally?) refer to what happens to the given class as to "class reification". I have also found reification as a jena class (link below) although I have not yet look into it: http://download.topquadrant.com/composer/javadoc/index.html?org/topbraid/core/model/Reification.html Thanks, Jos -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: Hlel Emna [mailto:[email protected]] Gesendet: Montag, 6. März 2017 12:31 An: [email protected] Betreff: Re: Converting a class into an individual or an individual into a class To my knowledge, reification is used only if there exists an n-ary relation which allows to connect an individual to more than an individual. There is no reification for a class <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail> Garanti sans virus. www.avast.com <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail> <#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: Lorenz B. [mailto:[email protected]] Gesendet: Montag, 6. März 2017 12:32 An: [email protected] Betreff: Re: Converting a class into an individual or an individual into a class 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
