Ontology Design Pattern Language Expressivity Requirements

In recent years there has been a large amount of research into capturing, publishing and analysing Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs). However, there has not been any analysis into the typical language expressivity required to represent ODPs and how these requirements sit with lightweight fragments of the widely used ontology language OWL. In this paper we therefore present a survey on the language expressivity required to express the ODPs contained in the two main ODP catalogs: ODP.org and ODPS.sf.net. We surveyed a total of 104 machine processable ODPs and found that the OWL representations of these patterns typically require highly expressive fragments of the OWL language such as ALCHIN , SHOIN , SHOIQ and SROIQ. We observed that most ODPs required the use of inverse properties, cardinality restrictions and universal restrictions, and that 10 patterns require OWL 2 constructs such as property chains, disjoint properties and qualified cardinality restrictions that are not available in OWL 1. Moreover, we found that most of the ODPs cannot be incorporated into ontologies that are constrained to fit into one of the OWL 2 profiles. Specifically, only 12 out of the 104 ODPs surveyed can be represented in OWL2EL, 13 in OWL2RL and 23 in OWL2QL. Despite this, we conjecture that it may be possible to rewrite and weaken some of them so that modellers using lightweight fragments of OWL can incorporate ODPs into their ontologies.