Ontology Design Rules Based on Comparability via Particular Relations

The difficulty of representing and organizing knowledge in reasonably complete ways raises at least two research questions: “how to check that particular relations are systematically used not just whenever possible but whenever relevant for knowledge providers?” and “how to extend best practices, ontology patterns or methodologies advocating the systematic use of particular relations and, at the same time, automatize the checking of compliance with these methods?”. As an answer, this article proposes a generic “ontology design rule” (ODR). A general formulation of this generic ODR is: in a given KB, for each pair of knowledge base objects (types or individuals) of a given set chosen by the user of this ODR, there should be either statements connecting these objects by relations of particular given types or statements negating such relations. This article further specifies this ODR and shows its interests for subtype relations and other transitive relations, e.g. part relations and specialization relations with genus & differentia. This article shows how this ODR can be implemented via OWL and SPARQL, at least for common simple cases (and, generically, via an higher-order logic based language).