Introduction to OWL Web Ontology Language for Medical and Biosciences Applications (Continued)

Instantiating Individuals of Classes

Classes are defined with the intent of being instantiated by individuals. For example, the upper value for diastolic blood pressure, as defined by the American Heart Association can be written in RDF as


  <DiastolicBloodPressureNormalRange rdf:ID="DiastolicBloodPressureNormalRange_AHA">
    <rdfs:comment rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string">
      The range recommended as normal by the American Heart Association (max 80 mmHg)
    </rdfs:comment>
    ...
    <upperValue rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#float">80.0</upperValue>
  </DiastolicBloodPressureNormalRange>

where the upper value is 80 mmHg.

Similarly, the various chemical substances, such as calcium, potassium, and so on can be defined as individuals. Individuals can be shown in an object diagram as shown here for the element calcium.

Individual Object Diagram

I have defined a number of individual test results in the file labresults_ff.owl, which I will use to discuss OWL applications later.

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