Martin G. Skjæveland, Daniel P. Lupp, Leif Harald Karlsen and Henrik Forssell.
Abstract: Reasonable Ontology Templates (OTTR) is a language for representing ontology modelling patterns in the form of parameterised ontologies. Ontology templates are simple and powerful abstractions useful for constructing, interacting with and maintaining ontologies. With ontology templates modelling patterns can be uniquely identified and encapsulated, broken down into convenient and manageable pieces, instantiated and used as queries. Formal relations defined over templates supports sophisticated maintenance tasks for sets of templates, such as revealing redundancies and suggesting new templates for representing implicit patterns. Ontology templates are designed for practical use; an OWL vocabulary, convenient serialisation formats for the semantic web and for terse specification of template definitions and bulk instances are available, including an open source implementation for using templates. Our approach is successfully tested on a real-world large-scale ontology in the engineering domain.
Keywords: ontology; ontology engineering; ontology design patterns; ontology macros