Building Geographic Ontologies - Linked Data: A Geographic Perspective - page 200

Every Football Stadium has part a
Football Pitch.
Every Football Stadium is
intended for Playing Football.
Medina Academicals Football
Stadium is a Football Stadium.
Median Academicals Football
Stadium has use Performing Music.

SubClassOf: Place, hasPart some
FootballPitch, isIntendedFor
some Playing Football
Individual: http://data.mereamaps.
gov.me/medina_academicals
Types: FootballStadium
Facts: hasUse some PerformingMusic

Now because “is intended for” is a subproperty of “has use,” we can ask both what
the intended purpose of the football stadium is (“playing football”) and what its uses
are (“playing football” and “performing music”).
Merea Maps also does one other significant thing: It realizes that it would be
sensible to create a new micro-ontology “Uses” that will contain the usage hier-
archy that it has started to develop along with the two properties “is intended for”
and “has use.” By doing so, it enables others to use this ontology on its own, if they
so wish, and ensures that the Topographic Ontology itself does not become too
bloated. This whole process has also shown that what we are beginning to see is
the construction of a network through the interaction between separate hierarchies:
so far a hierarchy describing the relationships between Features and a hierarchy
describing Usages. The Feature hierarchy is also used twice in the construction of
the network describing places.

10.4.4.5 Other Ontology Design Patterns
An ontology design pattern is a “reusable successful solution to a recurrent model-
ling problem,” and so far in this section, we have described those that have arisen
in Merea Maps' ontology. However, it may well be that you encounter the need for
other ontology design patterns as you proceed to construct your ontology. While
it is beyond the scope of this topic to describe all the patterns that have been sug-
gested in the literature, as they have arisen in attempts to solve modeling prob-
lems in many different domains, there is a useful Web site listing such solutions:
http://ontologydesignpatterns.org . These include patterns like “punning,” “ n -ary
relations,” “value partitions,” and part-whole relations.
Punning addresses the problem of wanting to refer to something as both a class
and an instance in the same ontology, depending on context. This is known as
“metamodeling,” and while it is straightforward to do in RDFS or OWL Full, it can
only be achieved in a DL-compatible fashion in OWL 2 by declaring the thing as
a class and then reusing it as the subject of a statement involving an object or data
property. The OWL reasoner then treats the class and individual views of the object
as different things, although they share the same URI.
Rather than the usual binary relation that links one individual to another indi-
vidual or value, an n -ary relation links an individual to several other individuals or
values. This allows us to include more information about the linking property, for
example, our certainty about it, its relevance, or context; or, we can model the links
between the subject, direct object, and indirect object of a statement.
There are four main use cases for n -ary relations, which can be represented by
different modeling patterns (Noy and Rector, 2006):