#41 Translation of 'of', 'by' and 'from' is insufficient
The current rabbit parser (in ROO 1.0.1) translates the built-in relationships 'of', 'by' and 'from' as relationships rbt:of, rbt:by and rbt:from defined in the Rabbit ontology. These translations are difficult to use during reasoning. For example, if we use:
Usage of Earth & Space Sciences Ontologies
in a sentence, we want a reasoner to be able to infer that this is an Ontology Related Process, defined as:
Ontology Related Process is anything that:
is a kind of Process;
involves an Ontology.
This means that we need to say that relationship 'of' is a special type of relationships 'involves', but this is not always the case as relationship 'of' can be used in several ways. The main problem is that relationship 'of' (and 'by' and 'from') is used in natural language as a shorthand for several types of relationships depending on the domain and range of that relationship. So in:
Usage of something
and
Education of somebody
the relationship 'of' refers to a different type of relationship.
An improvement would be to automatically generate special subtypes of the 'of' relationship when these are used. So:
Usage of something
would be translated as
Usage and (relatesToUsageOf something)
subPropertyOf(relatesToUsageOf rbt:of)
and
Education of SomeBody
would be translated as
Education and (relatesToEducationOf Somebody)
subPropertyOf(relatesToEducationOf rbt:of)
If we want to add reasoning over these relationships we can then say that
The relationship 'Education of' is a special type of relationship 'is received by'.
And in the original case we could say that
The relationship 'Usage of' is a special type of the relationship 'uses resource'.
This approach could also be extended to the commonly used relationship 'has'.
Note that the proposed solution would hide the created relationships from the user, so they would never see a relationship 'is related to education of' (unless they specified it). It requires the extension of Rabbit to allow describing the built-in relationships as described above (The relationship 'Usage of'), which is currently not supported. Currently, you could say:
The relationship 'of'...
but as argued above, you would never want to restrict the catch-all relationship 'of' as it can be used in different ways.
