Novel reasoning strategies

Potential strategies to implement novel inference procedures introduced in the OBD Reasoner page. These comprise: the Balhoff rule and the Mabee rule for inferring the absence of features in taxa.

Prelude: Instance relations and class relations

It is useful to conceptualize two entities in a domain of knowledge such as biology viz. classes and instances. Every entity in the domain is an instance. Instances can be grouped together on the basis of the properties they exhibit, such as the things that are colorless. Classes are groupings or sets of instances on the basis of common properties that they exhibit. An example of a class would be car, which includes all the entities (instances) which comprise a chassis resting (typically) on 4 wheels which is powered by an internal combustion engine, such as my Porsche 911 Turbo or the car you drive.

Subsumption semantics (as inherent in the is_a relation) hold between sets of real-world instances or classes. For example, the set of all left-handed people above the age 35 is subsumed by the set of all the people above the age 35 (who may be left- or right-handed or ambidextrous). The subsumption semantics of the is_a relation are defined in the OBO relations ontology as follows: "...C is_a C' if and only if: given any c that instantiates C at a time t, c instantiates C' at t..." In plain English, this means: the set of all left-handed people above the age 35 is subsumed by (or included by) the set of people above 35 if and only if, a person who belongs to the group of left handed people above the age of 35 also belongs to the set of people above the age of 35. This is trivially valid in the real world. The relation is_a is therefore a class relation. On the other hand, exhibits in the Phenoscape context is what can be called an instance relation, because it relates real-world instances of taxa to actual phenotypes.

The Balhoff rule

The Balhoff rule can be summarized as follows. "IF SOME instances of a species A exhibits a phenotype P, AND ALL instances of species A are also instances of species B, THEN SOME instances of species B exhibit phenotype P." Using FOL constructs, this can be represented as shown below.

Rule: <math>\forall</math>A, B<math>\exists </math>X: is_a(A, B) <math>\and </math>R(A, X) <math>\Rightarrow</math> R(B, X)

In our use-case, A and B are terms from a species taxonomy, and R is the exhibits relation. Note that this rule is applicable to all relations that R represents. In the real world, if we know that some combustion engines have four cylinders (while some other have six), we can correctly deduce that some engines (which include both 4 cylinder and 6 cylinder engines) have four cylinders. The only constraint on this rule is that some kind of subsumption relationship hold between A and B. The is_a name of the relation can be conceivably replaced by kind-of for example; as long as the semantics of the relation implied subsumption or inclusion, the Balhoff rule would hold.

The inclusion of the Balhoff rule would lead to the extraction of inferences such as "SOME Ostariophysians exhibit increased thickness of hyoid bones and SOME Ostariophysians exhibit decreased thickness of hyoid bones." All these inferences are extracted from phenotype assertions about different species like Gonorhynchiformes and Cypriniformes that are subsumed by Ostariophysians.

Implementation Strategy

The OBD reasoner, upon invocation, creates inferences by manipulating existing records in the Phenoscape database and adding new inferences to the database itself. The implementation the Balhoff rule can be done trivially by adding a new rule to the OBD reasoner, which will add new inferred records to the Phenoscape database with a SQL INSERT command.

The absence of features problem

Canonical ontologies define properties of typical or ideal classes in the domain of knowledge. In the domain of fishes, it is typical for "wild" fish specimens belonging to the Ostariophysian clade to exhibit basihyal cartilage. However, fishes belonging to the Siluriformes clade, which is subsumed by the Ostariphysian clade are characterized by the absence of basihyal cartilage. The Mabee rule is a proposal to resolve the conflicting assertions formally stated as "ALL instances of a clade C1 typically exhibit a feature F1 AND ALL instances of a clade C2 which is a subclass of C1 do not exhibit F1"