Patterns for Programming in the Semantic Web

Originally proposed in the mid-90s, design patterns for software development played a key role in object-oriented programming not only in increasing software quality, but also by giving a better understanding of the power and limitations of this paradigm. Since then, several authors have endorsed a similar task for other programming paradigms, in the hope of achieving similar benefits. In this paper we discuss design patterns for the Semantic Web, giving new insights on how existing programming frameworks can be used in a systematic way to design large-scale systems. The common denominator between these frameworks is the combination between different reasoning systems, namely description logics and logic programming. Therefore, we chose to work in a generalization of dl-programs that supports several (possibly different) description logics, expecting that our results will be easily adapted to other existing frameworks such as multi-context systems. This study also suggests new constructs to enforce legibility and internal structure of logic-based Semantic Web programs