Representing Kinship Relations on the Semantic Web

Kinship plays a fundamental role in human communities as a basic principle for organizing individuals into social groups. Representing kinship relationships in a formal and precise way is then a crucial task when modelling many knowledge domains, and it may constitute a relevant benchmark for the reasoning layer of the Semantic Web. In this paper we face the problem of representing some basic aspects of kinship relationships using the fragments of OWL2 corresponding to the description logics SROIQ and EL. As a first step, we provide an intuitive but formal description of some kinship terms, using an expressive description logic. From this intuitive description, we derive a set of test cases, indicating the expected inferences that should be drawn from the candidate ontologies. Finally, three different ontologies (two for SROIQ and one for EL), whose coherence with the intuitive description of kinship terms is established, are compared by means of these test cases.