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I'm looking for a way to add an Object Property to all instances of a given class.

Example Problem:

Let's say I'd define three classes. Religious_Person Supreme_Being Christian a subclass of Religious_Person.

Now I'd like to have an Object property "devotes" which has a domain of Religous_Person and a range of Supreme_Being.

I have three instances of Christian: Marck, Bob and Cathy. I have one instance of Supreme_Being: God.

Now I'd like to state Marck devotes God, Bob devotes God, and Cathy devotes God. It seems tedious to do this for every instance, so I'd like to express that each instance of the class Christian devotes God by default. Now ofcourse this might be somewhat confusing as from this example it might seem that I'd want each and every Religious_Person to devote to only one Supreme_Being, which is not the case.

Example:

Let's say JackAndJillian is a Religious_Person that devotes both Jack and Jill. So I'd like each instance of JackAndJillian to devote both Jack and Jill (whom would both be instances of Supreme_Being).

It feels to me like "devotes" should be a object property of the class Christian, however this is not possible due to classes not having properties.

I'm using protege to help myself in building an ontology so if there'd be a way I can express this in protege that would be great.

Actaeonis
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1 Answers1

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  1. You can use owl:hasValue in a SubClassOf axiom (in Manchester OWL syntax):

    Class: Christian
   SubClassOf: Religious_Person and devotes value God

  2. There is no concept of default value in OWL. Inference in OWL is monotonic, thus, you cannot remove any statement by adding other statements.

UninformedUser
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  • Thanks for the answer, I've found a similar approach here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29075078/is-it-possible-to-make-property-assertions-on-class-level-in-owl-2 perhaps this can be marked as duplicate. – Actaeonis Apr 07 '17 at 14:34