Eva Blomqvist, Linköping University, Sweden Torsten Hahmann, University of Maine, USA Karl Hammar, Jönköping University, Sweden Pascal Hitzler, Kansas State University, USA Rinke Hoekstra, Elsevier B.V., Netherlands Raghava Mutharaju, IIIT-Delhi, India María Poveda-Villalón, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain Cogan Shimizu, Kansas State University, USA Martin G. Skjæveland, University of Oslo, Norway Monika Solanki, University of Oxford, UK Vojtěch Svátek, Prague University of Economics and Business, Czech Republic Lu Zhou, Kansas State University, USA
Ontologies are the corner stone of any data modeling or knowledge representation effort. Engineering an ontology is a complex task, where domain knowledge, ontological accuracy and computational properties need to be carefully balanced. As with any engineering task, the identification and documentation of common patterns can significantly bootstrap the design of ontologies, and increases the overall quality and reusability of the result. Such Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) can provide ontology designers with a stronger connection to requirements and a better communication of their semantic content and intent in order to improve guidance for reuse. There is a clear need to have pattern catalogues that cover a wide range of patterns and domains. At the same time, Semantic Web applications can benefit from additional knowledge patterns and specialized software patterns for semantic applications. But to achieve the promised adoption and reuse, ontology design patterns also need to be shared by a community of practice using a common language for describing and discussing patterns and the modeling problems they address.
This book is a selection of extended versions of the papers published at the Workshop on Ontology Design and Patterns (WOP)(http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/wiki/WOP:Main) from 2017 to 2020. This workshop is a yearly event that covers issues related to quality aspects of ontology engineering and ontology design patterns (ODPs) for data and knowledge representation using Semantic Web technologies. WOP is organized annually, and is habitually co-located with the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), including WOP 2017 held in Vienna, Austria, WOP 2018 held in Monterey, USA, WOP 2019 held in Auckland, New Zealand, and WOP 2020, which should have been held in Athens, Greece originally, but was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Every year, WOP successfully attracts a large number of researchers and professionals in the field of ontology engineering and ontology design patterns.
The topics covered by the papers collected in this book range from a method to instantiate content patterns, through a proposal on how to document a content pattern, to a number of patterns emerging in ontology modeling in various situations and applications. As a collection based on papers presented at 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 a recent book [1] 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 Committees of WOP 2017 through to 2020 who provided useful and constructive comments to the papers. They are Oscar Corcho, Matthew Horridge, David Carral, Agnieszka Ławrynowicz, Yingjie Hu, Krzysztof Janowicz, Adila Alfa Krisnadhi, Torsten Hahmann, Monika Solanki.
Finally, the editors would like to express their gratitude to IOS Press for the opportunity of publishing this volume and to the ISWC organizers who ensured a smooth running of the workshop from WOP 2017 to 2020.
References
[1] Hitzler P, Gangemi A, Janowicz K, et al., editors. Ontology engineering with ontology design patterns – foundations and applications. (Studies on the Semantic Web; Vol. 25). IOS Press; 2016.