Making sense of design patterns

Abstract

This paper discusses the way in which design patterns may improve the current practice of ontology engineering. It presents five requirements that go beyond the current state of the art of collecting and curating design patterns. We build on the thesis outlined in [17] that design patterns should be one of several possible outcomes of a fundamental design decision. We emphasise their relation to structures in cognition rather than domain dependence. This to improve our understanding of what ontology design patterns are, and how they relate to (modelling) expertise. We provide a definition of structural design patterns, give a number of examples, and discuss further work. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.