Re: [protege-user] Enumerated Classes and Puns: TBox or ABox?

Michael,

The distinction between Tbpx and Abox is not that one consists of classes and the other instances. Tbox is the “terminology" component of a domain model. It defines the vocabulary of the domain. The entities in a terminology may be represented by classes and individuals, such as the degrees of spiciness in your pizza ontology. The Tbox contains sentences describing concept hierarchies. Abox is the “assertion” component consisting of specific facts of the domain.

Puns and assertions made with punned individuals don’t fit into the FOL-based Tbox/Abox distinction, as they are devices designed to cram higher-order statements into OWL.


Best regards,

Samson

On Aug 14, 2025, at 3:03 PM, Michael DeBellis <[email protected]> wrote:

I've seen a few users in the past ask about ways to separate TBox from ABox and I've wanted to do that myself. For me it is mostly to be able to keep using Protege even when the amount of data is so large that it isn't practical to load the complete graph into Protege.

I've been trying to write some SPARQL to do this and there are two issues I was wondering about: Enumerated Classes and Puns. Should these be in the TBox or ABox? Conceptually, it seems to me that in both cases these are about the Terminology not data so they belong in the TBox, but I think technically since they are still instances they probably go in the ABox.

E.g., in my version of the Pizza tutorial there is an enumerated class called Spiciness with the definition: {Hot, Medium, Mild}. Those values aren't data, they are ways to tag Pizzas into different categories along the Spiciness dimension. Also, for the use cases I have in mind, I would definitely want those to be included in the excerpt from a big knowledge graph that I wanted to load into Protege, because what I want to do is view and possibly edit the model without the data and the model won't be correct without the individuals that define any enumerated classes.

Similarly for puns. Yes, they are instances and they do hold data but the data isn't for any specific individual it can represent all sorts of things like metadata or default values but in all use cases that I can think of it seems to me the puns belong in the TBox but my guess is that the official answer would be they are instances and instances go in the ABox.

Actually, as I think about it, this could come up in other ways too. E.g., once I had classes that were organized based on the state they were in. E.g., classes like California_Data, Illionois_Data and they had axioms like "has_state value California" or if we define an Adult as a Person whose age is equal to or greater than the xsd:decimal 18 those definitions and the numbers should also be in the TBox, even though normally an xsd:decimal would be in the ABox.

Michael
https://www.michaeldebellis.com/blog
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