Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Knowledge ...

Thomas Janke
room for communication errors as wells as produces high costs in terms <strong>of</strong> development time and
money to buy <strong>the</strong> expertise.
In order to mitigate those problems, this paper proposes an ontology engineering platform based on
two main principles. The first one is that domain experts model <strong>the</strong>ir domain using a domain-specific
language reflecting <strong>the</strong> special needs <strong>of</strong> that domain. This can be in terms <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> vocabulary provided,
<strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> level <strong>of</strong> abstraction as well as <strong>of</strong> expressivity <strong>of</strong>fered. In doing so, <strong>the</strong> process <strong>of</strong> modeling <strong>the</strong>
domain <strong>of</strong> interest is supposed to be much easier. The resulting model, in turn, is <strong>the</strong> basis for
generating concrete ontologies in various ontology languages. The second principle is that ontology
design patterns are applied automatically and transparently during ontology generation. As a result,
<strong>the</strong> domain engineer can directly pr<strong>of</strong>it from <strong>the</strong> knowledge <strong>of</strong> ontology experts.
The paper is structured in <strong>the</strong> following way: First, <strong>the</strong> most relevant research fields addressed by <strong>the</strong>
proposed platform are introduced. Thereafter, <strong>the</strong> architecture <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> platform is outlined. Based on
this, a reference implementation <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> most important components is presented. The paper
concludes by summarizing <strong>the</strong> approach and our contributions as well as by discussing future work.
2. Related work
This section provides an overview <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> most relevant research fields affected by <strong>the</strong> proposed
platform. Preliminary contributions and how <strong>the</strong> proposed approach can be refined from <strong>the</strong> latter are
discussed in particular.
2.1 Ontology design patterns
In analogy to s<strong>of</strong>tware design patterns, which are well established in <strong>the</strong> field <strong>of</strong> s<strong>of</strong>tware engineering
to describe best practices, <strong>the</strong> concept <strong>of</strong> ontology design patterns (ODP) has been introduced in <strong>the</strong>
domain <strong>of</strong> ontology engineering (Staab, Erdmann and Maedche, 2001), (Svátek, 2004), (Presutti and
Gangemi, 2008). In (Blomqvist and Sandkuhl, 2005) ODPs are defined as reusable, successful
solution to recurrent modeling problems. ODPs are also addressed by <strong>the</strong> W3C (W3C, n.d.).
Moreover, <strong>the</strong>re is an active community around ODPs which collects and categorizes patterns (ODP,
n.d.). Following <strong>the</strong> terminology used <strong>the</strong>re, this paper focuses on Transformational Patterns which
are used to translate expressions from one language into ano<strong>the</strong>r one. Examples <strong>of</strong> such modeling
problems are n-ary relations, inverse relations, and cardinality constraints. Those are introduced in
more detail in Section 4.2. For more patterns, <strong>the</strong> reader is referred to <strong>the</strong> cited sources. Apparently,
ontology patterns are a good way to help engineers to model better and more reusable ontologies.
Unfortunately, currently <strong>the</strong>y cannot be applied in a way that is transparent for domain engineers.
Some ontology editors, like Protégé 1 , try to tackle this problem by exposing patterns by means <strong>of</strong>
wizards, e.g. for creating value partitions in OWL. A similar approach is used by <strong>the</strong> XD Tools
project 2 . Although those efforts and tools simplify <strong>the</strong> application <strong>of</strong> patterns, <strong>the</strong>y do not allow for
automatic and transparent application <strong>of</strong> patterns.
The platform presented in this paper <strong>of</strong>fers authors <strong>of</strong> ODPs <strong>the</strong> possibility to provide <strong>the</strong>ir patterns
not only in text form but also in an executable way. A pattern can <strong>the</strong>n be plugged into <strong>the</strong> framework
and will be applied automatically during ontology generation. By providing patterns in such a way,
domain experts are empowered to apply <strong>the</strong>m without even realizing it. Given this, <strong>the</strong> preliminary
identified textual patterns, published by various contributors, can be implemented as executable
patterns in order to evaluate <strong>the</strong> platform. In reverse, <strong>the</strong> platform can foster pattern development and
in doing so contribute back to <strong>the</strong> ODP community.
2.2 Model driven ontology engineering
Model driven development (MDD) is a s<strong>of</strong>tware engineering methodology based on describing
applications in <strong>the</strong> form <strong>of</strong> abstract models which <strong>the</strong>n are iteratively transformed into more specific
models. There has been extensive research in <strong>the</strong> field <strong>of</strong> MDD and ontologies. Contributions in this
field mainly are focused on <strong>the</strong> relationship between UML and ontology languages. The main goal
was to understand <strong>the</strong> similarities and differences between <strong>the</strong> standard modeling language in <strong>the</strong>
field <strong>of</strong> s<strong>of</strong>tware engineering and ontology languages in order to bridge <strong>the</strong> gap between those two
worlds. Therefore, transformations from UML into RDF(S) has been discussed (Cranefield, Haustein
1 http://protege.stanford.edu/
2 http://extremedesign.sourceforge.net/
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