Describing ontology applications

Abstract

Semantic Web technologies are finally, after a few years of infancy, truly entering the business world to support the growing needs of computer aided information selection and processing. There are already quite well-defined development processes and methods in the software engineering field to handle the construction of large scale and complex enterprise systems, and to reuse knowledge in different software domains patterns are considered to be common practise. Patterns can be described on different levels of abstraction, but the patterns in the focus of this paper are on the software architecture level. In this paper we present a definition of the notion "ontology application pattern", as a special form of software architecture patterns describing an ontology-based system. We also show how such patterns, as well as the description of the pattern instantiations, can be described using a modified architecture description language. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.