We have identified a set of patterns that are commonly used by domain experts in their DL formalisations and OWL implementations, and that normally result in unsatisfiable classes or modelling errors. Thus they are antipatterns. A Koenig define antipatterns as patterns that appear obvious but are ineffective or far from optimal in practice, representing worst practice about how to structure and build software. We also have made an effort to identify common alternatives for providing solutions to them, so that they can be used by domain experts to debug their ontologies.

All these antipatterns come from a misuse and misunderstanding of DL expressions by ontology developers. Thus they are all Logical AntiPatterns (LAP): they are independent from a specific domain of interest, but dependent on the expressivity of the logical formalism used for the representation.

If it makes sense, we propose to the domain expert to transform the two universal restrictions into only one that refers to the disjunction of C2 and C3.

C1 subClassOf R only (C2 or C3); C2 disjointWith C3

other alternative solutions could be:

1) suppress the disjointness axiom.

2) create two sublass of C1 such as: C1.1 subClassOf C1; C1.1 subClassOf R only C2; C1.2 subClassOf C1; C1.2 subClassOf R only C3; C2 disjointWith C3;

3) create C4 such as C4 isEqualTo C2 or C3; C1 subClassOf R only C4; C2 disjointWith C3.

4) create two subproperty of R: R2 subPropertyOf R; R3 subProperty of R; C1 subClassOf R2 only C2; C1 subClassOf R3 only C3; C2 disjointWith C3.

see Aguas_de_Transicion concept in hydrontology.

Wet_Zone subClassOf Wetlands and are_inundated only Sea_Water and are_inundated only Surface_Water and are_inundated min 1 Thing;

see Zona_Humeda concept in hydrontology.

Wet_Zone subClassOf Wetlands and are_inundated only (Sea_Water or Surface_Water) and are_inundated min 1 Thing;