Reviews:OlafNoppens about Symmetric n-ary relationship

OlafNoppens about Symmetric n-ary relationship (Revision ID: n-ary relationship?oldid=10066 10066)

Overall suggestion (score): 0 - needs major revision

Review Summary: The patterns tries to express a symmetric n-ary relationship, i.e., that an individual A is related to an individual B with some additional attributes, and that B is related to A with exactly the same attributes. As a matter of course, it can be modelled with a traditional n-ary relationship pattern - but the symmetry has to be modelled explicitly. The patterns tries to eliminate this kind of redundancy.

However, it is not clear what the semantics of a "symmetric n-ary relationship" is. The use case (connection points and their distance) can't help because there are no n arguments. In that sense I understand it as a binary relationship with an additional attribute. The name "symmetric n-nary relationship" is misleading.

But even then it is not clear how the symmetry is guaranteered with the equivalent axiom: It seems to be a special case of a n-ary relationship where two instantiations wrt. one property is demanded.

Reviewer Confidence: high

Problems: As already said the main problem is the semantics of a "symmetric n-ary relationship". It also lacks for an explanation/proof of the implementation (which is not clear for me).

Community Relevance: high

Relation to Best Practices:

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Overall Understandability:

Clear Problem Description:

Clear Relevance and Consequences:

Clear Figures and Illustrations:

Missing Information: As the pattern is related to the W3C n-ary relationship I suggest to use the same type of diagram and/or examples. Moreover, an example in OWL and/or OWL building blocks are missing.

Posted: 2010/9/16 Last modified: 2010/09/16

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