On the approach to ensuring the property transitivity in web ontologies

The article focuses on the issues of knowledge representation in the form of web ontologies. The relevance of the study is due to the two factors. On the one hand, a large number of OWL ontologies and RDF datasets have been created as part of semantic web concept development in recent years. On the other hand, the OWL language has a number of limitations that do not always allow adequate representation of domain knowledge. For example, SPARQL queries that use the transitive properties of the OWL language can create some kind of "loops" and return incorrect information. This article demonstrates that in some cases it is preferable not to use the transitivity of properties in the ontology. The algorithm for traversing related entities, which enables solving the problem of “loops”, is proposed. To illustrate the issue, we use "Higher educational programs of Russian Federation" web application. This application is developed on the basis of the RDF dataset which contains information about scientific specialties, bachelor’s, master’s and postgraduate programs obtained from publicly available official documents of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation since 2001. To set up a correspondence between the fields of studies that have existed over the years in the Russian Federation, equalsTo transitive property is employed in the RDF dataset. Although the developed algorithm is formulated and used in terms of a specific domain to solve the problem of a particular application, it is quite universal and can be applied by web developers to solve the problem of transitivity in RDF datasets of other domains.

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