Common pitfalls in ontology development

The so-called Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs), which have been defined as solutions to ontological design problems, are of great help to developers when modelling ontologies since these patterns provide a development guide and improve the quality of the resulting ontologies. However, it has been demonstrated that, in many cases, developers encounter difficulties when they have to reuse the correct design patterns and include errors in the modelling. Thus, to avoid pitfalls in ontology modelling, this paper proposes classifying errors into two types: (1) errors related to existing ODPs, called anti-patterns, and (2) errors not related to existing ODPs, called pitfalls. This classification is the result of analysing a set of ontologies. This paper is focused on the pitfalls identified during the analysis. In addition the paper presents a classification of the pitfalls found and a set of pitfall examples.