Alignment of Ontology Design Patterns: Class As Property Value, Value Partition and Normalisation

Abstract

Design-pattern driven ontology construction, whether manual or (partially) automated, relies on the availability of curated repositories of Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) adequately characterized. In order to consistently apply a given ODP, not only it is important to characterize it in full, but also examine its alignment or deviation to other relevant ODPs in relation to it. Otherwise, possible inconsistencies in the application can lead to interoperability issues among the ontology models involved.
In that context, this paper revisits a specific version of three different ODPs: Class as a Property Value (CPV), Value Partition (VP) and Normalisation. The review of the CPV identifies two distinct modelling problems being tangled that prompt to decouple the pattern into two variants: a strict and a coarse CPV pattern. The examination continues with a comparative analysis among the patterns that reveals key alignments and differences at the structural and semantic level. These findings extends the reusability and compositional characteristics of the strict and coarse variants of the CPV ODP in relation to the other two patterns.
To illustrate our contribution existing examples in the literature are revisited. They demonstrate the alignments, differences and prototypical OWL idioms identified, which can assist ontology practitioners in mitigating the opportunity for inconsistencies when applying these recurrent ontology building blocks.

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