Extend DBpedia entity in Protege ontology

Question

I'm using Protege to develop an ontology that will include some things that are already described in DBpedia. Let's say I want to include a class 'Cities' and have 'Berlin' as an individual. My Berlin will have some properties the DBpedia Berlin doesn't but otherwise I'd like to 'reuse' DBpedia's Berlin.

Do I need to define my own Berlin and then use rdf:seeAlso or can I somehow import DBpedia's Berlin and add some properties?

Answer 1

Just use the DBpedia IRI,

If it's sufficient to simply talk about the same individual, just add the individual to your ontology (i.e., create an individual with the IRI http://dbpedia.org/resource/Berlin) and add whatever else you need.

or use your own IRI and add an owl:sameAs assertion,

You could also create an individual with your own IRI, e.g., http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19703414/Berlin and assert that it's owl:sameAs http://dbpedia.org/resource/Berlin. You're creating OWL individuals with Protege, and DBpedia is using an OWL ontology, and owl:sameAs is what you'd use to express the fact that two individuals are the same.

and be aware that rdfs:seeAlso might not do what you think it does.

rdfs:seeAlso is just for finding related information, e.g., a document about some resource, or the standard in which it's defined, etc. Even in the if you have

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19703414/Berlin rdfs:seeAlso http;//dbpedia.org/resource/Berlin

and someone retrieves http;//dbpedia.org/resource/Berlin and sees a bunch of triples with that subject, there's nothing telling them that

http;//dbpedia.org/resource/Berlin owl:sameAs http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19703414/Berlin

which is really the important thing.