Design Patterns for Semantic Web Ontologies: Motivation and Discussion

3. Reason–ability, i.e. usability for (ideally, non– trivial) inference by existing semantic web reasoners. The relatively high level of standardisation of semantic web ontology languages is in contrast to mostly ad hoc designed content of ontologies themselves. An overview of existing methods supporting ontology content creation is presented. Methods based on design patterns are then discussed in more detail as they seem most promising particularly for business environment. Examples of elementary problems typical for semantic web ontologies are shown, and their pattern–based solution is outlined. Unfortunately, many existing SWOs fail in one, if not all aspects. By consequence, the usefulness of semantic web is likely to be questioned: 1. Inaccurate ontologies will produce wrong results as soon as their implicit assumptions are violated. 2. Opaque ontologies (be they accurate) will either not be used outside their native application or will be mapped on an inadequate state of affairs. 3. Ontologies unusable for inference, if prevalent, will question the choice of OWL (as inference– oriented language based on description logics) for the backbone of semantic web.