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Ontology Design Patterns

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Handbook on Ontologies

Part of the book series: International Handbooks on Information Systems ((INFOSYS))

Summary

Computational ontologies in the context of information systems are artifacts that encode a description of some world, for some purpose. Under the assumption that there exist classes of problems that can be solved by applying common solutions (as it has been experienced in software engineering), we envision small, task-oriented ontologies with explicit documentation of design rationales. In this chapter, we describe components called Ontology Design Patterns (OP), and methods that support pattern-based ontology design.

We present a typology of OPs, and then focus on Content Ontology Design Patterns in terms of their background, definition, communication means, related work beyond ontology engineering, exemplification, creation, and usage principles. At the time of chapter’s final version, recently performed experiments of patternbased ontology design show remarkable quality improvement within some sample ontology design projects, specially in terms of compliance to tasks expressed as competency questions or scenarios.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For example, in the projects FOS: http://www.fao.org/agris/aos/, WonderWeb: http://wonderweb.semanticweb.org, Metokis: http://metokis.salzburgresearch.at, and NeOn: http://www.neon-project.org

  2. 2.

    With the exception of Logical OPs.

  3. 3.

    In software engineering, formal approaches to design patterns, based on dedicated ontologies, are being investigated, e.g. in so-called semantic middleware [34].

  4. 4.

    Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org/) is a programming environment used for developing Java projects.

  5. 5.

    http://whole.sourceforge.net/

  6. 6.

    See http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/

  7. 7.

    In the pragmatics of an ontology designer, the fact that all modelling solutions are representable as higher-order logic expressions is hardly relevant, and such implicit reengineering has been never documented as actually happening.

  8. 8.

    http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/writingPatterns.html#CommonPattern Forms

  9. 9.

    http://www.ontologydesignpatterns.org/schema/cpannotationschema.owl

  10. 10.

    See [36, 37].

  11. 11.

    http://www.topbraidcomposer.com/

  12. 12.

    http://www.ontologydesignpatterns.org/ont/dul//DUL.owl

  13. 13.

    http://www.ontologydesignpatterns.org/cp/owl/informationrealization.owl

  14. 14.

    http://www.ontologydesignpatterns.org/cp/owl/timeindexedpersonrole.owl

  15. 15.

    See [37] for more details.

  16. 16.

    Notice that the second requirement would also require to represent membership relation between a person and a band. The collection entity CP available at http://www.ontologydesignpatterns.org/cp/owl/collectionentity.owl addresses membership. We do not include the description of this CP and its usage for the sake of brevity.

  17. 17.

    Available at http://www.ontologydesignpatterns.org/cp/owl/timeinterval.owl

  18. 18.

    The screenshot shows the TopBraid Composer interface, see http://www.topbraidcomposer.com

  19. 19.

    See [36] area of proposed CP.

  20. 20.

    An interesting review of evaluation, selection and reuse methods in ontology engineering is in [40].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technology (ISTC-CNR), Rome, Italy

    Aldo Gangemi & Valentina Presutti

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  1. Aldo Gangemi
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  2. Valentina Presutti
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Correspondence to Aldo Gangemi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Inst. Informatik, Universität Koblenz-Landau, Universitaetsstr. 1, Koblenz, 56016, Germany

    Steffen Staab

  2. Inst. Angewandte Informatik und, Universität Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, 76128, Germany

    Rudi Studer

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Gangemi, A., Presutti, V. (2009). Ontology Design Patterns. In: Staab, S., Studer, R. (eds) Handbook on Ontologies. International Handbooks on Information Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92673-3_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92673-3_10

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