Assessing the safety of knowledge patterns in OWL ontologies

The availability of a concrete language for embedding knowledge patterns inside OWL ontologies makes it possible to analyze their impact on the semantics when applied to the ontologies themselves. Starting from recent results available in the literature, this work proposes a sufficient condition for identifying safe patterns encoded in OPPL. The resulting framework can be used to implement OWL ontology engineering tools that help knowledge engineers to understand the level of extensibility of their models as well as pattern users to determine what are the safe ways of utilizing a pattern in their ontologies.