Semantic Web technologies enable people to create data stores on the Web, build vocabularies, and write rules for handling data. They have been in use for several years now, and knowledge extraction and knowledge discovery are two key aspects investigated in a number of research fields which can potentially benefit from the application of semantic web technologies, and specifically from the development and reuse of ontologies. This book, Applications and Practices in Ontology Design, Extraction, and Reasoning, has as its main goal the provision of an overview of application fields for semantic web technologies. In particular, it investigates how state-of-the-art formal languages, models, methods, and applications of semantic web technologies reframe research questions and approaches in a number of research fields. The book also aims to showcase practical tools and background knowledge for the building and querying of ontologies. The first part of the book presents the state-of-the-art of ontology design, applications and practices in a number of communities, and in doing so it provides an overview of the latest approaches and techniques for building and reusing ontologies according to domain-dependent and independent requirements. Once the data is represented according to ontologies, it is important to be able to query and reason about them, also in the presence of uncertainty, vagueness and probabilities. The second part of the book covers some of the latest advances in the fields of ontology, semantics and reasoning, without losing sight of the book’s practical goals.

This is an open access book. It is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Ontologies are the corner stone of data modeling and knowledge representation, and engineering an ontology is a complex task in which domain knowledge, ontological accuracy and computational properties need to be carefully balanced. As with any engineering task, the identification and documentation of common patterns is important, and Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) provide ontology designers with a strong connection to requirements and a better communication of their semantic content and intent. This book, Advances in Pattern-Based Ontology Engineering, contains 23 extended versions of selected papers presented at the annual Workshop on Ontology Design and Patterns (WOP) between 2017 and 2020. This yearly event, which attracts a large number of researchers and professionals in the field of ontology engineering and ontology design patterns, covers issues related to quality aspects of ontology engineering and ODPs for data and knowledge representation, and is usually co-located with the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), apart from WOP 2020, which was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Topics covered by the papers collected here focus on recent advances in ontology design and patterns, and range from a method to instantiate content patterns, through a proposal on how to document a content pattern, to a number of patterns emerging in ontology modeling in various situations and applications. The book provides an overview of important advances in ontology engineering and ontology design patterns, and will be of interest to all those working in the field.

In recent years, knowledge graphs (KGs) and ontologies have been widely adopted for modeling many kinds of domain. They are frequently released openly, something which benefits those who are starting new projects, because it offers them a wide choice of ontology reuse and the possibility to link to existing data. Understanding the content of an ontology or a knowledge graph is far from straightforward, however, and existing methods address this issue only partially, while exploring and comparing multiple ontologies can be a tedious manual task. This book, Empirical Ontology Design Patterns, starts from the premise that identifying the Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) used in an ontology or a knowledge graph will go some way to addressing this problem. Its main focus is to provide tools which will effectively support the task of automatically identifying ODPs in existing ontologies and knowledge graphs. The book analyses the role of ODPs in ontology engineering, placing this analysis in the wider context of existing approaches to ontology reuse and implementation. It introduces a novel method for extracting empirical ontology design patterns (EODPs) from ontologies, and another for extracting EODPs from knowledge graphs whose schemas are implicit. Both methods are applied to ontologies and knowledge graphs frequently adopted and reused, such as Wikidata. The book also offers an ontology which can be used as a basis for annotating ODPs in ontologies and knowledge graphs, whether manually or automatically. The book will be of interest to all those whose work involves the use or reuse of ontologies and knowledge graphs.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 22nd International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2023, which took place in October 2023 in Athens, Greece. The 58 full papers presented in this double volume were thoroughly reviewed and selected from 248 submissions. Many submissions focused on the use of reasoning and query answering, witha number addressing engineering, maintenance, and alignment tasks for ontologies. Likewise, there has been a healthy batch of submissions on search, query, integration, and the analysis of knowledge. Finally, following the growing interest in neuro-symbolic approaches, there has been a rise in the number of studies that focus on the use of Large Language Models and Deep Learning techniques such as Graph Neural Networks.

Chapters “No. 10 and No. 21” are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.