A Comparative Study for Ontology and Software Design Patterns

Abstract

Ontology design patterns have been extended from software design patterns for knowledge acquirement in semantic web. The main concern of ontology design patterns is to how concepts, relations and axioms are established in a ontology using ontological elements. Ontology design pattern provide the solution of quality modeling for ontologies. In user prospective the presentation of ODP play a central role for the reusability of ontologies. This research determine the improvement areas in the presentation of content ODPs. Improvement in presentation can ultimately improve the understandability of a pattern from user perspective. Our objective is to analyze the template of different software engineering patterns (SEP) and ODP. On the basis of this analysis we suggest possible changes in current template and pattern presentation. It also includes determining the most important information about patterns which can help an ontology engineer in selecting an appropriate pattern. Presentation of design patterns is related to issues such as reuse, guidance and communication. Our main goal is to evaluate the current patterns presentation. The evaluation is focused on the analysis of current patterns. The ontology design pattern templates were compared with existing templates of other patterns for determine the improvement areas. The template of an ODP consists of many parts, the first question is to identify the most important and vital information concerning the design patterns. This information would help an ontology engineer to select an appropriate design pattern for the required ontology. The second question is about the users who work with ontology design patterns. Generally, users are divided into two categories; novice and expert ontology engineers. Novice users are the end-users who use design patterns to implement in the ontologies. Expert ontology engineers are those who actually develop ontology design patterns. Each category of user has its own information requirement regarding design patterns.