Ontology Design Patterns

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.