Workshop Focus and Relevance

As interest in the Semantic Web increases and technologies for realizing the semantic web become more mature, the need for high-quality and reusable semantic web ontologies increases. To address the quality and reusability issues, different types of Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) have emerged. Patterns can supply ontology designers with several kinds of benefits, including a direct link to requirements, reuse, guidance, and better communication. ODPs are well on their way to providing those benefits. ODPs have been proposed by the W3C and are currently being collected in various repositories, such as the catalogue maintained by the University of Manchester and the ODP portal at ontologydesignpatterns.org. However, pattern catalogues are still small and do not cover all types of patterns and all domains. Semantic Web applications could also benefit from additional types of patterns, such as knowledge patterns and specialized software patterns for semantic applications. In addition, to achieve communication benefits, patterns need to be shared by a community in order to provide a common language for discussing and understanding modeling problems. The workshop can leverage the activities conducted in the ontologydesignpatterns.org initiative, and aims to use the portal as its main means of communication, e.g. for pattern submission, reviewing and discussions outside the workshop schedule.

Reuse has been an important research subject in ontology engineering for many years, and this is also true for the semantic web community. Patterns are an approach to knowledge reuse that has proved feasible and very profitable in many other areas such as software engineering and data modeling. During the past few years, patterns for semantic web ontologies and ontology-based applications have been introduced, and at this point in time we believe that the community would highly benefit from a series of workshops focusing on this particular topic. An earlier workshop, Ontology Patterns for the Semantic Web , was arranged at ISWC2005, however at that time the community was considerably smaller. The focus then was on discussing reusable OWL and RDF ontologies addressing general open problems. The WOP series broadens this scope to include all patterns related to ontology design and knowledge engineering for the Semantic Web. This is in line with the successful EKAW2008 conference (with the sub-title Knowledge Patterns). Topics of this conference included ontology engineering patterns but also patterns for re-engineering of knowledge resources, process knowledge, social and cognitive aspects of semantics. The first workshop was held in conjunction with ISWC 2009, for more information see the WOP2009 website.

A workshop should be a practical and interaction-rich event, hence the workshop will have three parts: regular papers, posters/demos, and “pattern writing”, with a focus on the latter. The inspiration for this model comes from the pattern writing workshops for software patterns. The aim is to promote development and review of actual patterns, rather than papers describing patterns. Related events are also VoCamps for writing vocabularies for the Semantic Web.
Topics

The main aim of the workshop is to discuss and collect best practices and experiences, hence submissions should focus on some notion of best practices. Original research papers and poster papers are invited to consider the following (non exhaustive) list of topics:


* Good practices of ontology design
* Good practices for Linked Data and related applications
* Good practices for hybridization of semantic web and NLP techniques
* Good Practices and Patterns of semantic social networks, semantic wikis, semantic blogs
* Good Practices of Semantic Web in general


* Ontology Design Patterns and Linked Data
* Ontology Patterns and Microformats
* Patterns for using different vocabularies together e.g. FOAF, SIOC, DC, etc.
* Web semantics from a pattern perspective


* Software patterns for Semantic Web applications
* Interaction patterns and the Semantic Web
* Pattern-based methodologies for Semantic Web ontologies and software engineering
* Application Profiles
* Domain specific applications based on patterns and success-stories
* Pattern-based ontologies


* Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) and pattern-based ontology design
* ODPs for specific knowledge domains e.g. multimedia, fishery and agriculture, user profiling, business modeling, etc.
* Anti-patterns and their relations to ODPs
* ODPs for interacting with data
* Collaborative ontology design and collaboration patterns in ontology design and engineering
* Correspondence patterns for ontology matching and integration
* Lexico-syntactic patterns
* Reasoning patterns (workflows made of reasoning steps for addressing specific goals)
* Processes and services - process patterns
* Re-engineering patterns for conceptual models, folksonomies, lexicons, thesauri
* Problem solving methods and patterns


* Tools support for pattern-based knowledge engineering
* Pattern-based ontology evaluation and selection
* Automatic ontology construction (ontology learning) based on patterns
* Contextual reasoning and patterns as context
* Knowledge patterns and knowledge re-engineering based on patterns
* Pattern-based information extraction


* Quality evaluation of patterns
* Benefits of ontology patterns and knowledge patterns

The poster category is particularly suitable for short research papers (e.g. work-in-progress or preliminary results) and for descriptions of software tools supporting the design, management, discovery, matching, or any other way of processing ontology patterns. A poster can also provide a high-level description of a research project that has ontology patterns as one of its topics (position paper). A poster paper may or may not include a description of an application demonstration. Demo submissions will be treated in the same way as poster papers, with the addition that if accepted the authors are obliged to (in addition to their poster) provide a demo of their application at the workshop poster session.
Patterns

Pattern submissions for the pattern part of the poster session will be collected through the ODP portal, and templates for submission are provided for the following types of patterns (see general typology for explanation of the types):

* Content patterns
* Structural patterns: logical and architecture patterns
* Correspondence patterns: re-engineering and alignment patterns

For other types of patterns, or if the author wishes to elaborate on theoretical rather than practical aspects, a pattern description may be submitted as either a research paper or poster paper. A paper submission can be accompanied by a pattern submission, however the submissions will be reviewed separately.

Additionally, we invite submissions of interesting problems for the "pattern writing" sessions. Problems should be in the scope of “ontology engineering problems” (in a broad sense), i.e., problems where currently no ODP exist. The most interesting problem proposals will be selected through a voting process, and at the workshop the participants will be divided into groups based on interests and background, where each group will be assigned one proposed problem. The goal is to develop and propose an initial pattern candidate corresponding to that issue, which is presented to the rest of the participants at the end of the session and can then be posted in the ODP portal for revision and scrutiny. The person who proposed the problem will be present at the workshop to provide background information about the problem for the candidate ODP to be created.