Ebook: Advances in Ontology Design and Patterns

Karl Hammar, Jönköping University, Sweden

Pascal Hitzler, Wright State University, USA

Adila Krisnadhi, Wright State University, USA; and Universitas Indonesia

Agnieszka Ławrynowicz, Poznan University of Technology, Poland

Andrea Giovanni Nuzzolese, ISTC-CNR Rome, Italy

Monika Solanki, University of Oxford, UK

The study of patterns in the context of ontology engineering for the Semantic Web was pioneered more than a decade ago by Blomqvist and Sandkuhl [1] and Gangemi [2]. Since then, this line of research has flourished and led to the development of ontology design patterns, knowledge patterns, and linked data patterns: the patterns as they are known by ontology designers, knowledge engineers, and linked data publishers, respectively. A key characteristics of those patterns is that they are modular and reusable solutions to recurrent problems in ontology engineering and linked data publishing.

This book is a collection of revised and extended versions of the papers presented at the 7th edition of the Workshop on Ontology and Semantic Web Patterns (WOP 2016).

http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/wiki/WOP:2016

The topics covered by the papers collected in this book range from a method to instantiate content patterns, a proposal on how to document a content pattern, to a number of patterns emerging in ontology modeling in various situations. As a collection of papers presented in the workshop, the topics rather naturally focus on the more recent advances in ontology design and patterns, hence the title. For a more foundational discussion of this line of research, we refer the reader to Hitzler et al. [3] which is a compilation of tutorials and surveys on the state of the art regarding ontology modeling with ontology design patterns.

The editors would like to thank all members of the Program Committee of WOP 2016 who provided useful and constructive comments to the papers. They are Alessandro Adamou, Luigi Asprino, Eva Blomqvist, David Carral, Michelle Cheatham, Enrico Daga, Marilena Daquino, Victor de Boer, Michel Dumontier, Aldo Gangemi, Rinke Hoekstra, Yingjie Hu, Krzysztof Janowicz, Tomi Kauppinen, Jose Emilio Labra Gayo, Steffen Lohmann, Franesco Poggi, Valentina Presutti, María Poveda-Villalón, Mari Carmen Suárez de Figueroa Baonza, Ilaria Tiddi, and Charles Vardeman.

Finally, the editors would like to express our gratitude to IOS Press for opportunity of publishing this volume and to the ISWC organizers who ensured a smoothly run WOP 2016.

Bibliography

[1] Eva Blomqvist and Kurt Sandkuhl. Patterns in ontology engineering: Classification of ontology patterns. In Chin-Sheng Chen, Joaquim Filipe, Isabel Seruca, and José Cordeiro, editors, ICEIS 2005, Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, Miami, USA, May 25–28, 2005, pages 413–416, 2005.

[2] Aldo Gangemi. Ontology design patterns for semantic web content. In Yolanda Gil, Enrico Motta, V. Richard Benjamins, and Mark A. Musen, editors, The Semantic Web – ISWC 2005, 4th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2005, Galway, Ireland, November 6–10, 2005, Proceedings, volume 3729 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 262–276. Springer, 2005.

[3] Pascal Hitzler, Aldo Gangemi, Krzysztof Janowicz, Adila Krisnadhi, and Valentina Presutti, editors. Ontology Engineering with Ontology Design Patterns – Foundations and Applications, volume 25 of Studies on the Semantic Web. IOS Press, 2016.

Ontology Design Patterns are reusable building blocks for ontology modelling. As such, Ontology Design Patterns need to be understood by the humans who use them for ontology engineering tasks. In order to make it easier for ontology engineers to understand a previously unknown Ontology Design Pattern, the quality of the documentation of the pattern plays a central role. However, the question how to document Ontology Design Patterns effectively has so far largely been neglected in the research literature. In this paper, we investigate the topic systematically. We discuss the results of three separate surveys to determine the central aspects of good documentation for Ontology Design Patterns. We find that the surveys, which were conducted independently of each other, by two separate groups, essentially agree on the importance of key aspects of documentation.

In our experience, the modeling of events of all sorts is often central in ontology development. Indeed, many proposals for models of events exist, some in the form of lightweight vocabulary, and some in the form elaborately axiomatized ontologies. However, there is as of now no clear, generic, and concisely described pattern for modeling events as part of an ontology. In this brief paper, we describe such a core, minimalistic, generic pattern, and we describe it in the way in which we would have found it useful in our own modeling activities. We do not claim a lot of originality in doing this, we are rather filling an obvious gap in the ontology design patterns landscape.

We present a minimalistic metapattern which we call the Stub pattern. It acts as a type of placeholder for future extensions of an ontology in cases where a more fine-grained modeling would currently be counterproductive, but future extensions may call for more details. We motivate the Stub pattern, define it, and provide examples.

While the concept is certainly not new to ontology modeling, we have not been able to identify a published pattern on the fundamental notion of spatiotemporal extent, which captures the dimensions of things as they move through space and time. We present such a pattern, based on an already published pattern for semantic trajectories.

This chapter describes an ontology design pattern for modeling algorithms, their implementations and executions. This pattern is derived from the research results on data mining/machine learning ontologies, but is more generic. We argue that the proposed pattern will foster the development of standards in order to achieve a high level of interoperability among in silico scientific experiments. We describe the intent of the pattern, provide competency questions and the pattern formalization. We also present an example instantiation of the pattern in the machine learning domain.

In this chapter we present an ontology design pattern to conceptualize complaints, an important concept still uncovered by ODPs. The proposed Complaint Ontology Pattern (COP) has been designed based on the analysis of free text complaints from available complaint datasets (banking, air transport, automobile), among other knowledge sources. We present a detailed use-case from consumer disputes. We evaluate the pattern by annotating the complaints from our use case and by discussing how COP aligns to existing ontologies. Knowledge engineers can further model complaints for specific domains and processes, satisfying different requirements via COP specializations.

In this chapter we present an Ontology Design Pattern for the definition of situation-driven behaviour selection and arbitration models for cognitive agents. The proposed pattern relies on the descriptions and situations ontology pattern, combined with a frame-based representation scheme. Inspired by the affordance theory and behaviour-based robotics principles, our reference model enables the definition of weighted relationships, or affordances, between situations (representing agent's perception of the environmental and social context) and agent's functional and behavioral abilities. These weighted links serve as a basis for supporting runtime task selection and arbitration policies, to dynamically and contextually select agent's behaviour. The pattern is at the heart of the behaviour-based cognitive approach adopted in the EU H2020 MARIO project for the design of an autonomous service robot (i.e., the cognitive agent) to support elderly people with cognitive impairments.

This article describes an ontology design pattern for modelling events as elements of discourse. Information provided about an event is not treated as universal truth, but rather as a statement of a particular agent, based on defined sources. We demonstrate how this pattern can be used for modelling historical debates. We also propose specialisation of the pattern, which models presentation of the current events in mass media for the purposes of citizen control.

Logistics is a service-oriented industry. Trends like outsourcing and concentration on core competencies require logistics service providers to collaborate with each other and compose their services in order to fulfill complex customer demands. The idea of generic logistics service building blocks helps to make composition of logistics services more easy in general. The composition of logistics services from different providers is a challenging task due to the semantic gap of differing wordings, descriptions and IT-systems. With a central ontology design pattern for such logistics service building blocks, the semantic gap can be closed. Data and information (of services) from different providers can be made available, linked and interchanged easily within the network. Virtualized resources and digitalized collaboration are supported and the disruptive paradigm of cloud logistics is enabled.

This Chapter describes a specialization of the Description Ontology Design Pattern (ODP), i.e., the Description In Range ODP, that allows one to range the conceptualization of a descriptive context within specific borders defined by means of literal values. The specialization emerged within an e-government Linked Open Data (LOD) project named FOOD, where it was required to model in OWL descriptions of raw material and physical, chemical, organoleptic characteristics of European Union (EU) quality schemes for agricultural and food products – i.e., PDO (Protected Designation of Origin), PGI (Protected Geographical Indication) and TSG (Traditional Speciality Guaranteed).