A Metamodel for Annotations of Ontology Elements in OWL DL

Abstract

OWL DL puts several constraints on the possibilities to talk about the el- ements of an ontology. In particular, it is not possible to make statements about the axioms of an ontology or to make higher-order statements about the classes and prop- erties of an ontology. This lack of expressiveness may cause problems throughout the whole lifecycle of an ontology, and especially in its practical usage. In this paper we discuss different approaches to overcome these problems. We propose a metamodel for OWL DL that allows to express statements about ontology elements, including axioms. We further describe three possible groundings of the metamodel in OWL DL and present a number of tools which we developed to support the user in working with these models. Finally, we describe some use cases for the practical application of our approach.