1.1 added rdfs:isDefinedBy for all named entities
Created by Aldo Gangemi and Valentina Presutti
The description pattern. It is extracted from DOLCE-UltraLite by partial clone of elements.
defines
A relation between a Description and a Concept, e.g. a Workflow for a governmental Organization defines the Role 'officer', or 'the Italian Traffic Law defines the role Vehicle'.
is concept used in
è un concetto usato in
A more generic relation holding between a Description and a Concept. In order to be used, a Concept must be previously definedIn another Description
is defined in
è definito in
uses concept
usa il concetto
A generic relation holding between a Description and a Concept. In order to be used, a Concept must be previously definedIn another Description. This last condition cannot be encoded for object properties in OWL.
Concept
A concept can be an idea, notion, role, or even a reified class, and isDefinedIn a Description . Once defined, a Concept can be used in other descriptions. The classifies relation (see 'classification' pattern) relates concepts to entities at some time.
Description
A Description represents a conceptualization. It can be thought also as a 'descriptive context' that defines concepts in order to see a 'relational context' out of a set of data or observations. For example, a Plan is a description of some actions to be executed by agents in a certain way, with certain parameters; a Diagnosis is a description that provides an interpretation to a set of observed entities, etc. A Description typically defines at least one Concept, for example the 'preparing a coffee' Description could define concepts such as 'Heater', 'AmountOfWater', 'CoffeeMix', etc. With respect to other patterns, descriptions are 'abstractions' of situations (cf. the 'situation' pattern), and in some complex use cases (e.g. matching executions to plan models), the two patterns can be composed (see the descriptionsituation pattern).