Reasoning with Individuals and with Classes
From an RDF perspective, inferencing about individuals and inferencing about classes is very similar. In both cases, new triples are added to the model based on the triples that were asserted. From a modeling perspective, the two kinds of reasoning are very different. One of them draws specific conclusions about individuals in a data stream, while the other draws general conclusions about classes of individuals. These two kinds of reasoning are sometimes called A-box reasoning (for individuals) and T-box reasoning (for classes). The curious names A-box and T-box are historical and no longer have any relevance.
The utility of reasoning about individuals in a Semantic Web context is clear, and we have ...
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