Dimensions Affecting Representation Styles in Ontologies

PABLO R. FILLOTTRANI; C. MARIA KEET

Villa Clara

Conferencia; First Iberoamerican Conference on Knowledge Graph and Semantic Web; 2019

There are different ways to formalise roughly the same knowledge, which negatively affects ontology reuse and alignment and other tasks such as formalising competency questions automatically. We aim to shed light on, and make more precise, the intuitive notion of such ?representation styles? through characterising their inherent features and the dimensions by which a style may differ. This has led to a total of 28 different traits that are partitioned over 10 dimensions. The operationalisability was assessed through an evaluation of 30 ontologies on those dimensions and applicable values. It showed that it is feasible to use the dimensions and values and resulting in three easily recognisable types of ontologies. Most ontologies had clearly one or the other trait, whereas some were inherently mixed due to inclusion of different and conflicting design decisions.