Detecting Influences of Ontology Design Patterns in Biomedical Ontologies

Ontology Design Patterns (ODP) have been proposed to facilitate ontology engineering. Despite numerous conceptual contributions for over more than a decade, there is little empirical work to support the often claimed benefits provided by ODPs. Determining ODP use from ontologies alone (without interviews or other supporting documentation) is challenging as there is no standard (or required) mechanism for stipulating the intended use of an ODP. Instead, we must rely on modelling features which are suggestive of a given ODP’s influence. For the purpose of determining the prevalence of ODPs in ontologies, we developed a variety of techniques to detect these features with varying degrees of liberality. Using these techniques, we survey BioPortal with respect to well-known and publicly available repositories for ODPs. Our findings are predominantly negative. For the vast majority of ODPs we cannot find empirical evidence for their use in biomedical ontologies.