Overview

The Task Force on Ontology Engineering and Patterns of the W3C working group on Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment is producing a series of ontology design patterns and alternatives for addressing common issues. These patterns are directly influencing the development of the Protégé-OWL ontology development environment and its extensions from the CO-ODE project.

This tutorial will discuss the issues in these patterns and related problems. It will use a series of examples and hands on experience to explore common problems and alternative solutions and the trade-offs of alternative solutions

Example patterns include value partitions, n-ary relations, problems of distinguishing classes and individuals, parts and wholes, lists, qualified cardinality restrictions, etc. The final choice of issues will be driven by the results of the Task Force.

Goals

The major goal of this tutorial is to provide the attendees with both the theoretical foundations of ontology design and hands-on experience in the construction of ontologies and semantic web contents with Protégé-OWL-CO-ODE environment. More specifically the participants will

• Appreciate the issues that make OWL different from traditional knowledge representation languages.
• Understand the patterns developed by the Task force and their rationale.
• Learn how to use the expressive power of OWL and take advantage of its inferencing capabilities
• Gain hands-on experience with ontology development using the Protégé-OWL-CO-ODE tools

Ample time will be provided for feedback, questions and discussion.

Background

Ontologies are at the core of the Semantic Web technologies. Following the publication of the OWL Standard, W3C has established the Working Group on Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment because the new language requires new ways of working with it. As the discussion in the Working Group has shown, many of the issues considered by the task force are the ones that users often need to address but have difficulty understanding the alternatives and their applications. There are no textbooks yet detailing the issues of ontology development for the Semantic Web. Thus, the tutorial will provide a unique forum for ontology developers to learn about the trade-offs of different approaches, of implications of stepping outside the boundaries of OWL DL, solutions for common problems and so on.. As many members of the Semantic Web community begin to develop the critical mass of ontologies, discussing these issues is both timely and necessary. We have presented the tutorials at ISWC-2003 in Florida , ISWC 2004 in Japan , and the Manchester group is heavily engaged in a series of both introductory and advanced tutorials for both the EU Framework Projects community and the UK E-Science and Knowledge Management Commjnities. The tutorial by Matthew Horridge has become the de facto text book for introductions to reasoning in OWL-DL. Two of the proposers are members of the task force, and the W3C Working Group.