Qualifiers among Triples

Created in November 10, 2022

2022   ·   ontology   ssw

Originally posted as part of the CMPE58H course by Susan Üsküdarlı in the fall semester of 2022 at https://furkanakkurt5204.gitlab.io/personal/ontology/2022/11/10/qualifiers-among-triples.

Last week, we went over some ontologies brought up by our classmates. Browsing Toykan’s ontology, Ontology Lookup Service (OLS), the keyword some had caught my eye as independent of the usual triples (subject, predicate and object). Reading this week’s paper, Wikidata: A large-scale collaborative ontological medical database, I realized those are qualifiers that we also see in Wikidata.

The paper mentions that Wikidata items have claims “in the form of triples”. The subject refers to the item the claim is referring to. The predicate is used in place of the ontology concept property. Lastly, the object represents a value. Claims are then made more precise through qualifiers.

Example Qualifier from OLS

The item Acetaminophen has a relation: has role some xenobiotic. has role is the property; the purple part is a qualifier; xenobiotic is the value (object).