A Pattern For Interrelated Numerical Properties

“A childs year of birth is always greater than the year of birth of its parents.” – it is not easily possible to code this simple knowledge into a pure OWL ontology, i.e. without using any additional rule languages. Therefore it is not easy in OWL to detect semantic violations in this kind of statements. The two challenges are putting two orders (“greater” and “parent”) into relation and representing integers as individuals allowing a reasoner to infer knowledge about the “greater” relation. In the first part of this contribution we show a pattern for putting two transitive and asymmetric orders into a relation, such that conflicting information results in an inconsistent ontology. In the second part we present a pattern for expressing integers using their binary code. Due to the special construction a reasoner can infer knowledge about the relation between all integers in the ontology. By combining the two patterns we are able to represent the initial statement in an ontology.