An ontology design pattern to represent universal relationships

Ontologies are an important tool in knowledge representation. Currently, one of the most popular languages to model ontologies is the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Such language is in its second version (OWL 2), which was designed to overcome some issues in expressivity, syntax, semantics and other practical aspects of the previous version. However, it still lacks some constructs that would be useful in some domains and situations. One of such constructs is what could be called “universal relationship” (i.e. a relationship with maximal degree of universality, so that, if established between two classes, states that every individual of a class is related to every individual of the other by this particular relationship). Therefore, this work brings an ontology design pattern to address such modeling issue. It requires OWL 2 features to be implemented, but dispenses any other external resources to handle the problem. The article presents the structure of the pattern and its implementation steps, as well as an example from the biomedical field.