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w3c / sdw

Repository for the Spatial Data on the Web Working Group
https://www.w3.org/2020/sdw/
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Our project needs an inverse relation for time:hasTime #1337

Open ddooley opened 2 years ago

ddooley commented 2 years ago

I’m not sure if this is the right contact point, but my question is whether or not there is an inverse relation for the OWL-Time time:hasTime object property? If not we would appreciate one, perhaps called time:timePertainsTo to enable easy addition of dates associated with an entity. The RDF building tool (http://robot.obolibrary.org/template) we use reads in tabular data and converts to RDF triples, so reverse relations are sometimes much more convenient. (In our project case, types of regulatory pesticide issue/revocation etc. dates that have a many-to-one relation to a pesticide.)

Regards,

Damion

Damion Dooley, Ontology Development Lead Mobile 778-688-0049 Centre for Infectious Disease Genomics and One Health Faculty of Health Sciences, SFU, Canada

dr-shorthair commented 2 years ago

Hmmm. Since

ex:EventA time:hasTime ex:TimeEntityB .

is logically equivalent to 

ex:TimeEntityB time:timePertainsTo ex:EventA .

Can't you just mint the former?

These days I'm a little wary of creating inverse properties since then you have a synching challenge - if there are two ways to express the same assertion, then what if they are inconsistent? And in this case, since the cardinality of time:timePertainsTo relations are potentially large, then time:hasTime would generally be easier to manage.

ddooley commented 2 years ago

Hi Simon,

Indeed, with an extra table I can do the former. This request was just about shortcut convenience, but not a dealbreaker. The table we're putting into a RDF knowledge graph with the robot transform tool is a list of event types (pesticide authorized date, revoked date etc) per pesticide. Robot only has 1 subject entity per table row and all relations have to emanate from that entity, so having time:timePertainsTo lets us add one more TimeEntity-centric piece of info. Basically, doing the same semantically as IAO "is about" does for information about some entity.

ddooley commented 2 years ago

FYI, what the table looks like except I can't use "is about". Robot commands are 2nd line, they apply relation between id column and given column. image