The pattern literal reification is a modelling technique to address scenarios in which we need to bless particular literals, usually when applying data properties, in order to use them as subjects and/or full-fledged objects of semantic assertions.
Recently within the Semantic Web community a new topic has been actively discussed: whether and how to allow literals to be subjects of RDF statements (http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki/Literals as Subjects). This discussions failed to provide a unique and clear indication of how to proceed in that regard.
Although one of the suggestions coming out of the discussion was to explicitly include the proposal in a (future) specification of RDF, this topic is not actually new, particularly in ontology modelling. The needs to describe “typical” literals (specially strings) as individuals of a particular class has been addressed by a lot of models in past, such as Common Tag (through the class Tag), SIOC (through the classes Category and Tag), SKOS-XL (through the class Label), and LMM (through the class Expression).
After considering the above-mentioned models and other related and inspiring ones, we have developed a pattern called literal reification to address this issue. It allows to express literal values as proper ontological individuals so as to use them as subject/object of any assertion within OWL models.
IRI: http://www.essepuntato.it/2010/06/literalreification/Literal
IRI: http://www.essepuntato.it/2010/06/literalreification/hasLiteral
It connects individuals of any class to a reified literal.
IRI: http://www.essepuntato.it/2010/06/literalreification/hasSameLiteralValueAs
It relates the reified literal to another one that has the same literal value.
IRI: http://www.essepuntato.it/2010/06/literalreification/isLiteralOf
It connects the reified literal to the individuals that are using it.
IRI: http://www.essepuntato.it/2010/06/literalreification/hasLiteralValue
It is used to specify the literal value that an individual of litre:Literal represents.
has characteristics: functional
IRI: http://www.ontologydesignpatterns.org/schemas/cpannotationschema.owl#coversRequirements
IRI: http://www.ontologydesignpatterns.org/schemas/cpannotationschema.owl#hasComponent
IRI: http://www.ontologydesignpatterns.org/schemas/cpannotationschema.owl#hasIntent
IRI: http://www.ontologydesignpatterns.org/schemas/cpannotationschema.owl#hasUnitTest
IRI: http://www.ontologydesignpatterns.org/schemas/cpannotationschema.owl#isSpecializationOf
IRI: http://www.ontologydesignpatterns.org/schemas/cpannotationschema.owl#relatedCPs
IRI: http://www.ontologydesignpatterns.org/schemas/cpannotationschema.owl#scenarios
IRI: http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/contributor
IRI: http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/description
IRI: http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#comment
has same literal value asop(?x,?y) , has literal valuedp(?y,?v) -> has literal valuedp(?x,?v)
This HTML document was obtained by processing the OWL ontology source code through LODE, the Live OWL Documentation Environment developed by Silvio Peroni.
It describes reified literals, where the literal value they represent is speficied through the property litre:hasLiteralValue. Each individual of this class must always have a specified value.