Ontology patterns for complex activity modelling

Abstract

In this paper we propose an activity patterns ontology to formally represent the relationships that drive the derivation of complex activities in terms of the activity types and temporal relations that need to be satisfied. The patterns implement the descriptions and situations (DnS) ontology pattern of DOLCE Ultra Lite, modelling activity classes of domain ontologies as instances. The aim is to allow the formal representation of activity interpretation models over activity classes that are generally characterized by intricate temporal associations, and where it is often the case that the aggregation of individual activities entails the existence of a new (composite) activity. Due to the expressive limitations of OWL, these semantics are often defined outside the ontology language, e.g. they are encapsulated in rules and they are tightly-coupled with implementation frameworks, hindering the interoperability and reuse of the underlying knowledge. As a proof of concept, we describe the implementation of the activity pattern semantics using dynamically generated SPARQL rules in terms of CONSTRUCT graph patterns. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.