User:Laurent Lefort

Ontologies & semantic mashups, CSIRO ICT Centre, Canberra, Australia (@laurentlefort)

I am an ontologist in the team working on the application of semantic web technologies to develop environmental sensor networks for agriculture meteorology, biodiversity, water and climate change research. My current research interests includes the design of ontologies (using the Web Ontology Language (OWL)), linked datasets, semantic mashups and their use in data-intensive research service infrastructures. I have also served as a co-chair for W3C’s Semantic Sensor Network Incubator activity (SSN XG) and as the W3C Australia Office manager (@W3CAustralia on twitter).

I wont be able to be at DesignPatternCampParis2011 but I'd like to suggest to the chairs to reserve some time to discuss on visual representations of design patterns:

I have noticed that ontologydesignpatterns.org uses different graphical conventions (which are not always referenced)

• In general the graphical representation is based on TopBraid: Action Content OP
• but it may be based on a different formalism e.g. this figure describing a role composition pattern for this logical N-Ary Relation Logical OP

I agree with Martin that "UML class diagrams are only approximations of OWL ontologies". I would like to learn if there are "better" graphical representation which works for examples like the Good relations ontology.