Facets, Tiers and Gems: Ontology Patterns for Hypernormalisation
This work addresses ontology development for researchers and practitioners in knowledge representation, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing methodologies.
The paper tackles the challenge of ontology building by intersecting ontology normalisation with fully programmatic development, resulting in a new style called hypernormalisation that enables more flexible and standardized ontology organization.
There are many methodologies and techniques for easing the task of ontology building. Here we describe the intersection of two of these: ontology normalisation and fully programmatic ontology development. The first of these describes a standardized organisation for an ontology, with singly inherited self-standing entities, and a number of small taxonomies of refining entities. The former are described and defined in terms of the latter and used to manage the polyhierarchy of the self-standing entities. Fully programmatic development is a technique where an ontology is developed using a domain-specific language within a programming language, meaning that as well defining ontological entities, it is possible to add arbitrary patterns or new syntax within the same environment. We describe how new patterns can be used to enable a new style of ontology development that we call hypernormalisation.