Putting OWL in order: Patterns for sequences in OWL
Nick Drummond, Alan L. Rector, Robert Stevens, Georgina Moulton, Matthew Horridge, Hai Wang, Julian Seidenberg · 2006
ABSTRACT: Sequences are a natural part of the world to be modeled in ontologies. Yet the Web Ontology Language, OWL, contains no specific built in support for sequences or ordering. It does, however, have constructs that can be used to model many aspects of sequences, albeit imperfectly. This paper demonstrates two design patterns for modeling order using existing OWL-DL constructs. These constructs allow us to use standard DL reasoning to perform pattern matching akin to regular expression matching. Reasoning with standard DL reasoners works surprisingly well, but more efficient methods are almost certainly possible. The point of this paper is that formulating sequences in OWL-DL brings real benefits to users by allowing them to work at a higher level of abstraction than raw sequences and to deal with situations in which the details of the sequences are under specified.