Welcome to the main page of the Association for Ontology Design & Patterns (ODPA). The ODPA’s goals are to promote high-quality ontology design and engineering, with a focus on methods and tools arising out of ontology design patterns. In particular, the ODPA

  • runs an annual workshop on ontology design and patterns (WOP),
  • maintains the ontologydesignpatterns.org portal (this site),
  • runs a public mailing list related to ontology design and patterns (a Google group), and
  • engages in additional activities to promote ontology design & patterns, including the provision of dissemination materials, educational activities, and engagement with researchers and practitioners.

The Pattern Repository

Workshop on Ontology Design and Patterns

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. These workshops can leverage the activities conducted in the ontologydesignpatterns.org initiative, and aims to use the portal as their 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, e.g. a complete session of ISWC2011 was devoted to ontologies and patterns. 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, a second edition at ISWC 2010, a third edition at ISWC2012, a fourth edition at ISWC2013, and a fifth edition is to be held at ISWC2014 in Riva del Garda (see links below).

Organization

For details of the ODPA mission and organization, see the current ODPA charter. The ODPA was formed in 2016.

The ODPA is run by a board, consisting of regular board members, a managing committee, and a set of executive members. In addition to the board, the association has a set of regular members, mainly former board members and WOP chairs. Most activities of the ODPA, such as the WOP workshop, mailing list etc. are open to anyone, regardless if they are members of the ODPA or not. Only at the yearly meeting, where the board is elected, is it required to be a member in order to be eligible for voting - although the meeting as such will be open to anyone.

Yearly meetings:

  • The latest yearly meeting took place on September 14th 2020, 5pm CET. Minutes can be found here.
  • Yearly meeting of 2018 took place on February 13th 2018, 5pm CET. Minutes can be found here.
  • Yearly meeting of 2017 took place on 23rd 2017, 7pm CET. Minutes of this meeting can be found here.

Managing Committee

  • Andrea Giovanni Nuzzolese, ISTC-CNR (chair - elected 2020-2022)
  • Karl Hammar, Jönköping University (vice chair - elected 2020-2022, executive member 2016-2018, regular member 2018-2020)
  • Cogan Shimizu, Kansas State University (vice chair - elected 2020-2022)

Board Members

  • Luigi Asprino, University of Bologna (elected 2020-2022)
  • Gary Berg-Cross, Ontolog Forum (elected 2020-2022)
  • Eva Blomqvist, Linköping University (elected 2016-2018, chair - elected 2017-2020, elected 2020-2022)
  • Aldo Gangemi, ISTC-CNR (elected 2016-2018, re-elected 2018-2020, re-elected 2020-2022)
  • Fiorela Ciroku, University of Bologna (elected 2020-2022)
  • Pascal Hitzler, Kansas State University (vice chair - elected 2017-2020, elected 2020-2022)
  • Adila Krisnadhi, Universitas Indonesia (elected 2017-2020, re-elected 2020-2022)
  • Valentina Presutti, University of Bologna (vice chair - elected 2016-2018, vice chair - re-elected 2018-2020, elected 2020-2022)
  • Jim Salmons, Citizen Scientist at FactMiners.org and The Softalk Apple Project (elected 2018-2020, re-elected 2020-2022)

Members

  • David Carral, TU Dresden (WOP co-chair 2017)
  • Valentina Carriero, University of Blogna
  • Oscar Corcho, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (WOP co-chair 2017)
  • Torsten Hahmann, University of Maine
  • Rinke Hoekstra, Elsevier (WOP co-chair 2017)
  • Matthew Horridge, Stanford University (WOP co-chair 2017)
  • Raghava Mutharaju, IIIT Delhi
  • Silvio Peroni, University of Bologna
  • Edna Ruckhaus, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid
  • Martin Skjaeveland, University of Oslo
  • Monika Solanki, University of Oxford (WOP co-chair 2016)
  • Steffen Staab, University of Koblenz