Representing Social Reality in OWL 2

This paper introduces a design pattern that allows for the OWL 2 DL representation of concepts central to social reality: roles. The work presented here is motivated by experiences in the development of the LKIF Core ontology of basic legal concepts [10,8]. This paper applies modelling steps identified in earlier work for the representation of transactions [9] to the domain of roles. This is done by building on Searle’s theory of social reality [14]. We use the new features of OWL 2 to approximate a reified relation, and show how the approach of [9] can be reused to define a pattern for capturing roles, intentional concepts and n-ary relations [13].