Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist, 2nd Edition

Disjoint Sets

We have seen how we can use owl:complementOf to describe the class that includes all the individuals that are not in some class. A related idea is that two sets have no individual in common. When this happens, we say that the sets are disjoint, and we represent this situation in OWL using owl:disjointWith, as follows:

For any members of disjoint classes, we can infer that they are owl:differentFrom one another—for instance, we might assert that

we can infer that

This simple idea can have powerful ramifications when combined with ...