Ontology Patterns with DOWL: The Case of Blending

The Distributed Ontology, Model, and Specification Language DOL provides logic-independent structuring, linking, and modularity constructs. Its homogeneous OWL fragment, DOWL, we argue, can be seen as an ideal language for formalising ontology patterns in description logics. It naturally consumes earlier formalisms such as C-OWL or DDL, and extends these with various expressive means useful for the modelling of patterns. To substantiate this, we illustrate DOWL’s expressive power with a number of examples, including ontology design patterns, networks of ontologies, and ontology combinations. The latter are used to formalise conceptual blending, based on DOWL features such as renaming, filtering, forgetting, interpretation, and colimit computation.