What Causes Pneumonia? The Case for a Standard Semantics for "may" in OWL

: One of users' most frequent questions about OWL is "how do I say `may'?", as in "Bacteria may cause pneumonia." In many fields, particularly biomedicine, a high proportion of knowledge that users wish to capture in ontologies is of this form. The issue is closely related to dealing with fillers other existential restrictions, most obviously in partonomies: "All cars have engines", therefore "Engines may be parts of cars", but not "All engines are part of cars." There is no standard mechanism in the OWL language specification, API, reasoners, or query languages for dealing with these issues. In the absence of a standard, users have found various work arounds

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: OWLED
• Authors: Alan L. Rector, Robert Stevens, Nick Drummond
• Keywords: Natural Language Processing, OWL Language Specification, OWLED 2008, Query Languages, Work Arounds