Putting OWL in Order: Patterns for Sequences in OWL

Sequences are a natural part of the world to be modelled in ontologies. Yet the Web Ontology Language, OWL, contains no specific support for ordering. It does, however, have constructs that can be used to model many aspects of sequences, albeit imperfectly. This paper demonstrates a design pattern for modeling order within OWL-DL. This allows us to use standard DL reasoning to perform pattern matching akin to regular expression matching and works surprisingly well. The main point of this paper is that formulating sequences in OWL-DL brings real benefits to users by allowing them to work at a higher level of abstraction than raw sequences and to deal with situations in which the details of the sequences are under specified.