Patterns in Ontology Engineering: Classification of Ontology Patterns

In Software Engineering, patterns are an accepted way to facilitate and support reuse. This paper focuses on patterns in the field of Ontology Engineering and proposes a classification scheme for ontology patterns. The scheme divides ontology patterns into five levels: Application Patterns, Architecture Patterns, Design Patterns, Semantic Patterns, and Syntactic Patterns. Semantic and Syntactic Patterns are quite well-researched but the higher levels of pattern abstraction are so far almost unexplored. To illustrate the possibilities of patterns on these levels some examples are discussed, together with ideas of future work.