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Expressibility of OWL Axioms with Patterns

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Book cover The Semantic Web (ESWC 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12731))

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Abstract

The high expressivity of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) makes it possible to describe complex relationships between classes, roles, and individuals in an ontology. However, this high expressivity can be an obstacle to correct usage and wide adoption. Past attempts to ameliorate this have included the development of specific, presumably human-friendly syntaxes, such as the Manchester syntax or graphical interfaces for OWL axioms, albeit with limited success. If modelers want to develop suitable OWL axioms it is important to make this as easy as possible.

In this paper, we adopt an idea from the Protégé plug-in, OWLAx, which provides a simple, clickable interface to automatically input axioms of a limited number of types by following simple axiom patterns. In particular, each of these axiom patterns contains at most three classes or roles. We hypothesize that most of the axioms in existing ontologies could be expressed semantically in terms of simple patterns like these, which would mean that more complex patterns can be used very sparingly.

Our findings, based on an analysis of 518 ontologies from six public ontology repositories, confirm this hypothesis: Over 90% of class axioms in the average ontology are indeed expressible with our simple patterns. We provide a detailed analysis of our findings.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We refer to properties as roles, unless a distinction is relevant, as this is the standard description logic term. These include both object properties and data properties.

  2. 2.

    See https://protege.stanford.edu/.

  3. 3.

    See https://www.w3.org/TR/2012/REC-owl2-syntax-20121211/.

  4. 4.

    http://ontobee.org.

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Acknowledgement

The authors acknowledge partial support from the financial assistance award 70NANB19H094 from U.S. Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology and partial support from the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2033521.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Data Semantics Lab, Kansas State University, Manhattan, USA

    Aaron Eberhart, Cogan Shimizu, Sulogna Chowdhury, Md. Kamruzzaman Sarker & Pascal Hitzler

Authors
  1. Aaron Eberhart
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  2. Cogan Shimizu
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  3. Sulogna Chowdhury
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  4. Md. Kamruzzaman Sarker
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  5. Pascal Hitzler
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Aaron Eberhart .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Ruben Verborgh

  2. Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Katja Hose

  3. University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

    Heiko Paulheim

  4. ERCIM, Sophia Antipolis, France

    Pierre-Antoine Champin

  5. University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany

    Maria Maleshkova

  6. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Boadilla del Monte, Spain

    Oscar Corcho

  7. eBay Inc., San Jose, CA, USA

    Petar Ristoski

  8. FIZ Karlsruhe - Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany

    Mehwish Alam

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Eberhart, A., Shimizu, C., Chowdhury, S., Sarker, M.K., Hitzler, P. (2021). Expressibility of OWL Axioms with Patterns. In: Verborgh, R., et al. The Semantic Web. ESWC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12731. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77385-4_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77385-4_14

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