An Ontology Design Pattern for representing Recurrent Situations

TL;DR

This paper introduces an ontology design pattern for modeling recurrent situations that occur periodically and share invariant features, providing a foundational approach applicable across domains like cultural heritage.

Contribution

It presents a novel, generalizable ontology pattern for representing recurring situations, integrating existing foundational patterns and demonstrating its application in cultural event modeling.

Findings

Pattern formalizes recurrent situations as collections with shared properties.

Implemented in ArCo, the Italian cultural heritage knowledge graph.

Supports modeling of recurrent cultural events and ceremonies.

Abstract

In this paper, we present an Ontology Design Pattern for representing situations that recur at regular periods and share some invariant factors, which unify them conceptually: we refer to this set of recurring situations as recurrent situation series. The proposed pattern appears to be foundational, since it can be generalised for modelling the top-level domain-independent concept of recurrence, which is strictly associated with invariance. The pattern reuses other foundational patterns such as Collection, Description and Situation, Classification, Sequence. Indeed, a recurrent situation series is formalised as both a collection of situations occurring regularly over time and unified according to some properties that are common to all the members, and a situation itself, which provides a relational context to its members that satisfy a reference description. Besides including some exemplifying instances of this pattern, we show how it has been implemented and specialised to model recurrent cultural events and ceremonies in ArCo, the Knowledge Graph of Italian cultural heritage.