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

Thanks Samson, that's good to know and not what I thought. That's exactly
as I think it should be but not what I thought the "official" answer would
be. I also see your point about Puns. Just restating to make sure I'm
understanding: Puns are really a hack, they are used at the graph level but
aren't part of the logical model in the first place so asking whether they
are TBox or ABox isn't a sensible question.

Cheers,
Michael

On Thu, Aug 14, 2025 at 5:39 PM Samson Tu <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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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