From Reference Ontologies to Ontology Patterns and Back

Building proper reference ontologies is a hard task. There are a num- ber of methods and tools that traditionally have been used to support this task. These include foundational theories, reuse of domain and core ontologies, de- velopment methods, and software tool support. In this context, an approach that has gained increased attention in recent years is the systematic application of ontology patterns. This paper discusses how Foundational and Domain-related Ontology Patterns can be derived, and how they can be applied in combination for building more consistent ontologies in a reuse-centered process.

2004

This report brings together three different areas, Ontology Learning, ontology reuse and patterns in Computer Science in general. These three areas may not seem to have much in common but the report aims to illustrate the potential of bringing them together and to outline research possibilities in the field. Patterns have been successfully applied as a means for facilitating reuse and managing complexity in many areas. So far not many pattern approaches have emerged in Ontology Engineering especially when considering patterns for use with Ontology Learning systems or patterns to facilitate reuse of ontologies. This report is concluded by a discussion about future research possibilities in the field. Among other things more exchange between Ontology Engineering and Software Engineering is suggested. Researchers should draw from already existing knowledge when creating ontology patterns. The most interesting applications of ontology patterns in the future are to further facilitate Ontology Learning, by for example using the patterns as construction templates, and to facilitate reuse of ontologies by using the patterns to search and sort ontology libraries.

Handbook on Ontologies, 2009

Abstract. Within the Common Logic Ontology Repository (COLORE), the notion of reducibility among ontologies has been used to characterize relationships among ontologies. This paper uses techniques such as relative interpretation to show how one set of ontologies within the repository can be reused to characterize the models of other ontologies that are used in a wide variety of domains. A central theme of the paper is that ontology design patterns can be formalized as core ontologies within the ontology ...

Ontology patterns have been pointed out as a promising approach for ontology engineering. The goal of this paper is to clarify concepts and the ter- minology used in Ontology Engineering to talk about the notion of ontology patterns taking into account already well-established notions of patterns in Software Engineering.

2017

Reasonable Ontology Templates, OTTRs for short, are OWL ontology macros capable of representing ontology design patterns (ODPs) and closely integrating their use into ontology engineering. An OTTR is itself an OWL ontology or RDF graph, annotated with a special purpose OWL vocabulary. This allows OTTRs to be edited, debugged, published, identified, instantiated, combined, used as queries and bulk transformations, and maintained—all leveraging existing W3C standards, best practices and tools. We show how such templates can drive a technical framework and tools for a practical, efficient and transparent use of ODPs in ontology design and instantiation. The framework allows for a clear separation of the design of an ontology, typically managed by ontology experts, and its bulk content, provided by domain experts. We illustrate the approach by reconstructing the published Chess Game ODP and producing linked chess data.

Journal of The Brazilian Computer Society, 2002

Ontologies are becoming an important mechanism to build information systems. Nevertheless, there is still no systematic approach to support the design of such systems using tools that are common to information systems developers. In this paper, we propose an approach for deriving object frameworks from domain ontologies and then we show the application of this approach in the software process domain.

As ontologies find an ever-larger number of applications, the diversity of domain ontologies and the requirements for their intended uses increases as well, creating challenges for interoperability and tooling. There are often multiple ways of modelling the same knowledge, which have coalesced into ontology patterns and modelling styles, and pattern alignments for perceived to semantically the same domain knowledge have been identified. To facilitate interoperability and applicability of foundational ontology-based modelling choices with domain ontologies and so-called application ontologies or conceptual data models, we propose a general framework for the substitution of one pattern for another. This can be applied by various methods, including purely syntactic comparisons. A proof-of-concept tool that implements such a syntax-based approach for FOL ontologies encoded in CLIF is demonstrated and evaluated against a set of DOLCE-aligned ontologies.

2016

Developing ontologies from scratch is a hard task, since an ontology is expected to provide a comprehensive and coherent representation of a specific portion of the world. Thus, reuse is highly recommended in ontology development, allowing ontologies to be build based on pre-existing models, leading to better quality results. In this sense, Ontology Patterns (OP) have been appointed as interesting tools to facilitate reuse, and several authors from the Ontology Engineering community have already proposed OPs and mechanisms to apply them. However, automated systems to support their use in practice are still missing. In this paper, we present an ontology editor extension that fills this gap, supporting Domain-related OPs reuse and management. This extension includes a catalogue of Domain related OPs, exemplified in this paper through a set of OPs for the Collaboration domain. Resumo.O desenvolvimento de ontologias a partir do zero é uma tarefa difícil, uma vez que uma ontologia deve f...

1998

Currently, there is a considerable body of experience in building ontologies. Nevertheless, knowledge acquisition using ontologies is still a research issue. The goal of this paper is to take a further step towards a systematic approach for building ontologies. An approach for engineering ontologies is presented with a case study. This approach i ncorporates the best features of the existing methods and proposes other features, such as the use of a graphical language for expressing ontologies, an axiom classi cation and some guidelines for ontology capture, formalization, evaluation and documentation. An ontology development process model is also discussed, showing how to proceed in the development o f o n tologies.