Weaving ontology aspects using a catalog of structural ontology design patterns

Modular development of ontologies proves beneficial at different stages of the ontology lifecycle. In our previous work, we proposed aspect-oriented ontology development as a flexible approach to modular ontology development and a-posteriori modularization of existing monolithic ontologies, inspired by aspect-oriented programming and based on so called cross-cutting concerns. Similar to other formalisms for modular ontologies (e.g. E-Connections), aspect-oriented ontologies rely on an extension of the used ontology language. This derivation from the standard in turn requires specially adapted tools in order to use these ontologies in applications. In this paper, we present an approach to the recombination of aspect-oriented ontology modules to standard OWL 2 ontologies by using an aspect-weaving service. The weaving service relies on a preconfigured catalog of structural ontology design patterns. We show that the use of the weaving service yields syntactically correct and semantically complete ontologies while still allowing ontology developers to fully benefit from modular ontology development.