Semantic Patterns

The Semantic Web is fastly being developed with RDF (and RDFS) being widely accepted as core representation formalism. On the basis of RDF, a number of proposals have been made to provide a semantically richer language. Due to the many different, often conflicting requirements that knowledge representation languages deal with, there does not appear a single language on the horizon, but rather a Babel of languages built on RDF. This, however, runs contrary to compatibility between agents feeding on semantic information and to the reuse of semantic information on the Web. In this paper, we present a methodology for engineering semantic knowledge such that these semantic structures are easier reusable when switching between several representation languages. For this purpose, we reconsider the commonalities of representation languages and their usage in actual applications. Out of this consideration we derive semantic patterns as a means to communicate knowledge at an epistemological level of representation and as a means for (partial) execution by any particular implementation of any representation language. The underlying method we propose combines the advantages of formal specification methods (where feasible) with informal, natural language explanations such as used in software engineering for design patterns.