Cardinality restriction axioms during reasoning?

Hello:

When I look at OWL constraint axioms (e.g., the constraint defined below, from Stardog documentation), they seem to appear only when talking of data integrity. We are trying to figure out if those constraints apply also during reasoning (when running Sparql, for example).

As an example: we want to infer a relationship (e.g, via propertychainaxiom). You define a cardinality restriction on the max number of (the inferred) properties per object and expect that sparql + reasoning would not get any result on the inferred property if it violates the cardinality constraint. However, naive tests are failing and we are getting inferred relationships that break down the axiom.

A mock implementation below

model:Team a owl:Class .

model:assigned_to a owl:ObjectProperty ;
rdfs:domain model:Employee ;
rdfs:range model:Team .

model:Employee a owl:Class .

model:scheduled_for a owl:ObjectProperty ;
rdfs:domain model:Team ;
rdfs:range model:Project .

model:Project a owl:Class .

model:works_on a owl:ObjectProperty ;
rdfs:domain model:Employee ;
rdfs:range model:Project ;
owl:propertyChainAxiom ( model:assigned_to model:scheduled_for ) .

[
a owl:Restriction ;
rdfs:subClassOf model:Employee ;
owl:maxQualifiedCardinality 1 ;
owl:onClass model:Project ;
owl:onProperty model:works_on
] .

I would like to limit the number of works_on properties I infer on an employee

My question: Am I conceptually wrong and reasoning does not take into account cardinality constraints? Or am I missing something in my implementation/setup

Changing the type of reasoning from SL to DL did not work. I have also read, in more generic OWL references, that a reasoner may not consider two instances different unless explicitly specified. Not sure if that's behind the issue.

A cardinality restriction is not a constraint when doing reasoning - it is just for inference. The only thing a reasoner would infer is that all Projects a single Employee is working on would be the same as all you stated is there is at most one. A logical inconsistency will only happen if those Projects would have been modeled as being different individuals, i.e. if you state :Project1 owl:differentFrom :Project2 pairwise to all. Or you use the shortcut axiom owl:AllDifferent

That said, the Open World Assumptions holds for OWL reasoning (as well as SPARQL reasoning under entailment regimes) and no Unique Names Assumptions (the reason why you have to state that two Project URIs are indeed not the same entities)

Hi, thanks for the reply. We will take a closer look to the no unique names assumption