17th Workshop on Ontology Design and Patterns (WOP 2026)

About

The Workshop on Ontology Design and Patterns (WOP) is a long-standing forum dedicated to advancing quality in ontology design and the development of ontology design patterns (ODPs) for data and knowledge engineering within the Semantic Web. Now in its 17th edition, WOP has established itself as a key venue for researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of knowledge representation, reuse, and engineering methodology.

In recent years, ODPs have gained renewed prominence through their relevance to knowledge graphs and AI-assisted knowledge engineering — areas where structured, reusable modeling solutions offer direct benefits in terms of requirements alignment, modularity, and communicability. As knowledge graphs continue to mature and intersect with emerging challenges such as ontology governance, lifecycle management, and neuro-symbolic integration, WOP 2026 aims to serve as a focal point for both foundational research and applied contributions.

WOP 2026 pursues two complementary objectives: first, to provide a dedicated venue for presenting and discussing patterns, pattern-based ontologies, systems, tools, and datasets; and second, to sustain and expand the ontology design pattern community by cultivating a shared vocabulary for describing modeling problems and their solutions.

The workshop welcomes contributions from ontology engineers, knowledge graph researchers and practitioners, AI and knowledge representation researchers, Semantic Web developers, and anyone working on the design, evaluation, or application of structured modeling solutions for data and knowledge engineering.

Call for Papers and Patterns

We invite the submission of original research results related to the focus areas of the workshop in one of three categories:

• Research papers (maximum 12 pages, CEUR style) presenting mature work and established results.
• Short papers (maximum 6 pages, CEUR style) presenting proposed research directions, novel ideas, or more general positions or discussions.
• Ontology Design Patterns (maximum 10 pages, CEUR style) should solve a particular modeling problem of relevance either to the broader ontology engineering community or to some specific knowledge domain in a novel and reusable manner. Pattern submissions must additionally be submitted through the ODP community portal. Note that accepted pattern submissions are presented through a poster session (see instructions for poster submissions below).

All the page limit applies excluding references.

Topics of Interest

We particularly welcome contributions on the development of high-quality ontologies (with or without ODPs), applications of ODPs for knowledge graph construction and maintenance, and the integration of ontology design patterns with emerging AI technologies. We encourage pattern descriptions for both established and emerging domains, including applications in geosciences, life sciences, sustainability, digital humanities, and areas such as explainable, trustworthy, and responsible AI. The main topics of interest are:

• Use of ontology design patterns for any kind of knowledge engineering, including
  • Pattern-based ontology design, conceptual modeling or knowledge engineering broadly
  • Pattern use in knowledge graph or linked data creation (including pattern-driven linking or data publishing)
  • Pattern-based information extraction, ontology learning, and relation to NLP or Large Language Models
  • Pattern use in streaming, ingesting or evolving knowledge
  • Use of patterns for ontology evaluation, quality assurance, ontology selection, integration or alignment
  • Pattern-based development of semantic applications
  • Reasoning with patterns (including automated reasoning, verification, contextual reasoning or neuro-symbolic approaches)
• Methods and tools for developing high-quality ontologies (with or without the help of patterns), including
  • Ontology engineering by domain experts
  • LLM-assisted ontology engineering and pattern generation
  • Quality attributes or metrics in ontologies and ontology engineering
  • Quality assurance and testing approaches for ontology engineering
  • Collaborative and community-driven ontology development
• Development or analysis of ontology design patterns, including
  • Pattern extraction and discovery
  • Analyses of ontology design patterns or their uses
  • Antipatterns and their relations to ODPs
  • Pattern repositories, catalogs, and recommendation systems
• Development and use of patterns in specific domains, including
  • Data lakes, business intelligence, or Big Data integration
  • Geosciences, life sciences, engineering, digital humanities, cultural preservation, and sustainability
  • IoT, smart homes & cities, smart agriculture
  • Semantic technology, including social networks, semantic wikis, or blogs
  • AI ethics, explainability, and trustworthy AI
  • Climate change and environmental monitoring
• Modularity in Knowledge graphs and patterns, including
  • Theoretical and cognitive aspects of modularity
  • Modularity in knowledge engineering, knowledge graphs, ontologies, and linked data
  • Extraction, versioning and evolution with modules
  • Representing knowledge in context
• Ontology design patterns for AI integration, including:
  • ODPs for structuring prompts and interactions with LLM-based systems
  • Validation and grounding of LLM outputs using ontologies
  • Hybrid approaches combining symbolic and neural

Submission Instructions

Submissions should be made via EasyChair , following the CEUR Formatting Style . Note that papers not adhering to the style guidelines or the maximum page limit will be rejected without review.

Design pattern submissions must also be made through the ODPA community portal on GitHub. A submission is considered complete once there is an open pull request from your forked branch. Instructions for creating a fork and submitting a pull request can be found here .

Review Process and Publication

Each paper will be reviewed by at least two reviewers. Final accept/reject decisions are made by the chairs based on these reviews. Acceptance is conditional, meaning that only accepted papers that perform the changes requested by the reviewers (this will be carefully checked by the chairs) and where at least one author registers for the workshop, will be included in the proceedings and in the workshop program. These papers will be made available online from the workshop webpage.

Please note that ISWC usually does NOT allow "workshop-only" registrations, i.e., registering for the workshop will therefore require registering for the main conference + WOP.

Instructions for accepted papers, presentations, and post-proceedings will be provided later.

Detailed Instructions for Pattern Submissions

Your pattern will be reviewed based on the following set of criteria:

• the practical utility and reusability of the pattern by a community,
• the relevance of the problem addressed by the pattern,
• if the pattern encodes some best practice within a community,
• the degree to which the pattern has seen real-world use or otherwise has been evaluated for fitness,
• and the completeness and clarity of the pattern submission, i.e., if all fields in the community portal have been filled and all aspects properly explained.

Accepted patterns must be improved based on the review comments (i.e., an update of the patterns in the ODP portal is mandatory).

Important Dates

• Workshop paper submissions: July 24, 2026 Extended: July 30, 2026 (AoE)
• Workshop program with list of accepted papers available online: August 21, 2026 September 14, 2026
• Workshop will be held on: October 25, 2026, 9:00–18:00

Program

09:10–10:00

Keynote, by Valentina Presutti

A love story in patterns: Twenty years of ontology design patterns, continued with language models

Abstract. Twenty years ago, a group of Semantic Web researchers set out to do for ontologies what the Gang of Four did for software. This talk retraces that story, from NeOn and eXtreme Design to WOP, through an analysis of 788 papers. Today language models can generate and match patterns, solving what we could not, while the bottleneck moves to trust. I argue that patterns matter more than ever, as the unit linking models, people and knowledge graphs, and outline the challenges ahead.

WOP Organization

WOP 2026 Chairs

• Abhilekha Dalal, Kansas State University, USA
• María Poveda-Villalón, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
• Christian Kindermann, Stanford Medicine, USA
• Gunjan Singh, FIZ Karlsruhe, Germany
• Alice Augustine, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), USA

PC Members

• Loris Bozzato, University of Insubria, Italy
• Valentina Carriero, University of Bologna, Italy
• Miguel Ceriani, National Research Council (CNR), Italy
• Antrea Christou, Wright State University, USA
• Alexis Ellis, Wright State University, USA
• Nidhi Goyal, Mahindra University, India
• Torsten Hahmann, University of Maine, USA
• Chris Jaldi, Wright State University, USA
• Anna Lippolis, University of Bologna, Italy
• Giorgia Lodi, National Research Council (CNR), Italy
• Raghava Mutharaju, IIT Palakkad, India
• Cogan Shimizu, Wright State University, USA
• Antoine Zimmermann, École des Mines de Saint-Étienne, France