Generating Ontologies from Templates: A Rule-Based Approach for Capturing Regularity

TL;DR

This paper introduces a second-order language based on ontology templates (OTTR) for succinctly specifying ontologies, enabling transparent modeling of recurring patterns and analyzing reasoning and decidability issues.

Contribution

It proposes a novel rule-based language for ontology specification that is independent of specific description logics and explores its semantics and reasoning properties.

Findings

Language supports capturing recurring axiomatic patterns.

Decidability results for reasoning tasks over the language.

Discussion of open problems in ontology specification.

Abstract

We present a second-order language that can be used to succinctly specify ontologies in a consistent and transparent manner. This language is based on ontology templates (OTTR), a framework for capturing recurring patterns of axioms in ontological modelling. The language and our results are independent of any specific DL. We define the language and its semantics, including the case of negation-as-failure, investigate reasoning over ontologies specified using our language, and show results about the decidability of useful reasoning tasks about the language itself. We also state and discuss some open problems that we believe to be of interest.