Database Reference
In-Depth Information
The relationship “has place name”
is a special type of the
relationship “name [foaf]”.
The Relationship “has place name”
must have the subject Place.
Ash Fleet Farm URI mm:/871113.
Ash Fleet Farm has place name
“Ash Fleet Farm”.
mm:hasPlaceName :subpropertyOf
foaf:name.
mm:hasPlaceName :domain mm:Place.
mm:/871113 mm:hasPlaceName
“Ash Fleet Farm”.
Then, if the worst comes to the worst and
foaf:name
is constrained by the
domain of
foaf:Person
, you will only have to break the link between the two
properties. We can start to handle further levels of detail by generating new subprop-
erties for different types of place name that may be applied to the farm, for example,
old names, shortened forms, and so on:
Ash Fleet Farm has old name “Manor Farm”.
Ash Fleet Farm has preferred name “Ash Fleet Farm”
1
.
Ash Fleet Farm has short name “Ash Farm”.
Ash Fleet Farm has colloquial name “Ashy Farm”.
And so on.
Each needs to be made a subproperty of
mm:placename
, which means each will
also inherit any domain or range restrictions, so these do not need to be repeated.
So, to define and use the property
hasOldName
property, all we need to do is
The relationship “has old name” is a
special kind of the relationship
“has place name”.
mm:hasOldName :subpropertyOf
mm:hasPlacename.
mm:/871113 mm:hasOldName
“Manor Farm”.
Ash Fleet farm has old name
“Manor Farm”.
You might ask why it is useful to make these all subproperties of
mm:hasPlaceName
.
The reason is that by doing so you can ask the question: What place names are asso-
ciated with Ash Fleet Farm? and the query will return all of these names. So, we
now have an easy way to return all the names: place name (current name), old names,
short names, and so on.
But, things can be more complicated than this. What if we want to say that the
name Ash Fleet Farm only became the name of the farm in 1891 when it was renamed
from Manor Farm? Or similarly, that Manor Farm became the old name for Ash
Fleet Farm in 1891? We can do this without changing anything that we have already
put in place by adding further properties to our ontology. For example, “
has a
preferred name valid from
” and “
has an old name valid from
”:
Ash Fleet Farm has a preferred name valid from 1891.
Ash Fleet Farm has an old name valid from 1891.
But, this only works in very limited circumstances. What if there are multiple
old names? To which old name does the previous statement refer? There is no way
