Abstract : The difficulty of representing and organizing knowledge in reasonablycomplete ways raises at least two research questions: “how to check that particularrelations are systematically used not just whenever possible but whenever relevantfor knowledge providers?” and “how to extend best practices, ontology patterns ormethodologies advocating the systematic use of particular relations and, at thesame time, automatize the checking of compliance with these methods?”. As ananswer, this article proposes a generic “ontology design rule” (ODR). A generalformulation of this generic ODR is: in a given KB, for each pair of knowledgebase objects (types or individuals) of a given set chosen by the user of this ODR,there should be either statements connecting these objects by relations of particulargiven types or statements negating such relations. This article further specifies thisODR and shows its interests for subtype relations and other transitive relations,e.g. part relations and specialization relations with genus & differentia. This articleshows how this ODR can be implemented via OWL and SPARQL, at least forcommon simple cases (and, generically, via an higher-order logic based language).
