Ontology Analysis Based on Ontology Design Patterns

Abstract

The so-called Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs), which have been defined as solutions to ontological design problems, are of great help to developers when modelling ontologies since these patterns provide a development guide and improve the quality of the resulting ontologies. However, it has been demonstrated that, in many cases, developers encounter difficulties when they have to reuse ontology design patterns and include errors in the modelling. Thus, to avoid errors in ontology modelling, this paper proposes classifying errors into two types: (1) errors related to existing ODPs, called anti-patterns, and (2) errors not related to existing ODPs, called worst practices. This classification is the result of analysing a set of ontologies which come from an academic experiment. In addition, the paper presents a general classification of the worst practices found and a set of worst practice examples. Finally, the paper shows an example of how the aforementioned worst practices could be related among them.