Towards an OWL 2 Profile for Defining Learning Ontologies

Many OWL ontologies for the learning and education domain have been reported in the literature. The preliminary analysis of those ontologies shows that they use similar constructors and axioms but they do not seem to be following a particular or common fragment (profile) of the OWL language. We analyzed a corpus of 10 representative learning and educational ontologies in order to identify the usage patterns of OWL constructors in those ontologies. Based on our findings and considering the fact that OWL is superseded by OWL 2, we propose OWL 2 Learn, a profile of OWL 2 that is expressive enough for specifying all those ontologies in our corpus with minor modifications. This profile can offer guidance on selecting appropriate constructors for developing an OWL 2 ontology for the learning and education domain.