P.: A logical geo-ontology design pattern for quantifying over types

Ontology design patterns ease the engineering of ontologies, im-prove their quality, foster reusability, and support the alignment of ontologies by acting as common building blocks or strategies for reoccurring modeling problems. This makes ontology design pat-terns key enablers of semantic interoperability and, hence, a crucial technology for representing the body of knowledge of such hetero-geneous domains as the geosciences. While different types of pat-terns can be distinguished, existing work on geo-ontology design patterns has solely focused on content patterns, i.e., design solu-tions for domain classes and relationships. In this work, we pro-pose a logical pattern that addresses a frequent modeling problem that has hampered the development of sophisticated geo-ontologies in the past, namely how to model the quantification over types. We argue for the need for such a pattern, explain why it is difficult to model, demonstrate how to implement it using the Web Ontology Language OWL, and finally show how it can be applied to model-ing concepts such as biodiversity