Individuals
An individual is an identifier which is a surrogate for a precise entity of the discourse universe. For instance, if Town is a concept type then Budapest is an individual of type Town. A concept type may have subtypes, e.g. SmallTown could be a subtype of Town, an individual cannot have ‘subindividuals’. The ontological individuals are the individuals about which all the users agree, i.e. for all users an ontological individual must represent the same entity in the discourse universe. An ontological individual is entered into a COGUI-ontology with a primitive concept type called its privileged type. For instance, if the COGUI-ontology concerns Modern Art, and if Picasso is an ontological individual of privileged type Artist representing the famous artist Pablo Picasso, then it is impossible to use the identifier Picasso for representing a Citroën car (unless the conjunctive type Car, Painter is not banned). COGUI checks that an ontological individual appearing in an annotation has a type which is compatible (i.e. not banned) with the privileged type of the individual. The ontological individuals can be usedl to define banned types.All individuals appearing in a COGUI-ontology (e.g. in rules, constraints or prototypical knowledge) must be ontological individuals. Thus, the set of ontological individuals can be completed only whenever all knowledge representing in a COGUI-ontology have been considered.
The individual view lists all individuals in a sortable table. Needless to complete, the list of individuals automatically updates when the user references individuals in different graphs. Select individuals in the list to drop them to the graphs and right click to popup the contextual menu to rename, change the privileged type.
 a sortable list of individuals with a contextual menu |
 search individuals with regular expression |
Individual graphs
User can introduce some encyclopedic facts attached to each individual. The role of these facts is to ensure basic knowledge about the domain; it is useless to repeat this in each graph. An individual graph is an SG which owns at least one individual marker. During the annotation process, if an ontological individual is used, then the individual graph associated with it can be merged to the fact graphs where it appears. Graph below presents an example of an individual graph which defines the individual Mary. This individual marker will have the type Woman in the vocabulary.
create an individual graph attached to "Mary"
Individual graph can be edited from contextual menu.The graphical editor recognizes the head of the graph and paints it with special color and border, this vertex is a concept typed with the privileged graph. It cannot be edited or removed, just moved
Head of the graph is a concept with privileged type
Ontological knowledge about Mary
use individual graphs with Sum wizard.
The "Sum and Normalize assistant" proposes to merge individual graphs with facts for each concerned individuals
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Although the individual graph looks like a prototypical graph, it was designed for a very different purpose. While graph patterns and prototypics represent potential information, used (or not) in facts contextually, graphs of individuals, for their part represents an effective knowledge. |
