Pizza ontology in Topic Maps? in CTM?

marijane white <[email protected]> Fri, 9 Dec 2011 12:29:25 -0800
Newsgroups gmane.text.xml.xtm.general
Message-ID <CAKWi4E0+V-nz_jL2DY0xPdcZUq-=G9Ya7GUfCbBpnDtPT=ZR8Q@mail.gmail.com>
Hello Topic Mappers,

So I have this new job where I get to build models, but my employer uses
OWL-DL rather than Topic Maps.  I definitely think about modeling in Topic
Maps, so I've been scaling the RDF/OWL learning curve, and one of the
things I've done to that end is walk through the Manchester Pizza Tutorial
for OWL [1],which seems like a good introduction, despite the fact that the
pizza ontology itself seems somewhat flawed.

Earlier this week, it occurred to me to try recreating the pizza ontology
in Topic Maps, to help cement my understanding of both technologies, and
maybe also bring my TM skills up to date by learning CTM, because so far
the topic maps I've created by hand have been in XTM 1.0.   I got as far as
faithfully recreating the tutorial's hierarchy of pizzas, toppings, and
bases, but when I hit the part about modeling hasIngredient relationships
between pizzas and their toppings or bases, I was like, "Wait a minute --
isn't a pizza really as association between a crust and some toppings?"
I'm not sure if this is really true. I've been chewing on it for a couple
of days now, and I thought I'd come here and ask y'all about it.

So, my questions:
- Has anyone here ever done the pizza tutorial for OWL?
- Has anyone here ever tried implementing the examples in the pizza
tutorial as a topic map?  Is this a silly idea?
- Do you think the idea that a pizza is an association between a crust and
some toppings seems like an appropriate way to model a pizza?
- If so, how would you express this in CTM?  I'm struggling with how to
identify instances of associations, and also it's not clear to me if CTM
supports n-ary associations.

For example, how about a pepperoni pizza?
pizza(base: Thin_and_Crispy, topping: Mozzarella, topping: Pepperoni)
Or maybe a margherita pizza?
pizza(base: Thin_And_Crispy, topping: Mozzarella, topping: Tomato, topping:
Basil)

Is this allowed?  Is it a bad idea?  Do I need to try a different modeling
approach?
If I wanted to refer to these instances by name elsewhere in the topic map,
how do I do that?  Add a reifier?
How about adding scoped names to the association roles?

I think I know how I would do these things in XTM 1.0 but it's not yet
clear if I can or should do them in CTM.  (I have a suspicion some of the
modeling habits I developed using XTM 1.0 might be considered poor modeling
practice.)


Thanks for any assistance anyone might be able to provide.

-marijane

[1] - http://owl.cs.manchester.ac.uk/tutorials/protegeowltutorial/

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