A major barrier for the adoption of semantic web technologies in industry is the construction of sustainable knowledge bases; domain experts and end-users often find semantic web languages and tools difficult to use.

Reasonable Ontology Templates (OTTR) is a language and framework that allows abstractions or modelling patterns over RDF/OWL to be succinctly represented and instantiated. It is designed to address the needs and expertise domain experts, ontology engineers, and data managers in the process of creating and maintaining high-quality, maintainable knowledge bases.

The tutorial will give an introduction to the OTTR framework, discuss modelling best practices for sustainable knowledge bases using templates and demonstrate practical use templates. The tutorial is relevant for semantic web practitioners and ontology engineers who are eager to make efficient use of modelling patterns in their work, and for information managers from industry looking for possible ways to introduce ontology development into their enterprise.

Tutorial participants will learn:

• the benefits of using abstractions like ontology templates to build, interact with and maintain ontologies;
• how to use ontology templates for designing ontologies;
• how to use and build ontology templates with simple, but powerful, open source tools;
• how to create and extend, navigate and use template libraries; and
• how to construct large ontologies with ontology templates using different input formats such as spreadsheets, relational databases, and SPARQL endpoints

The principles of OTTR templates are possible to grasp without prior knowledge of semantic web technologies. However, participants will benefit from a basic knowledge of RDF and OWL, and experience from using these languages and related tools in order to fully appreciate the features of OTTR templates—no introduction to RDF or OWL will be given.

• Introduction and motivation. Benefits of a pattern-based approach to ontology engineering.
• OTTR template basics. Examples and plenary exercises.
• Template libraries. Navigating and using the core OTTR template library.
• Building and using template libraries for new use cases.

The tutorial material consists of a slide deck.

The exercises will make use of our reference implementation Lutra which is available for download via http://ottr.xyz or via the feature limited web application WebLutra at http://weblutra.ottr.xyz.

Martin G. Skjæveland is the lead developer and manager of Reasonable Ontology Templates project. He is a researcher at the University of Oslo and leads the Ontology Engineering research program of SIRIUS – a centre for research-driven innovation for Scalable Data Access. He also holds an adjunct position as associate professor in data science at the University of Stavanger.

Daniel P. Lupp is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo working on best-practice methodologies for the use of OTTR in ontology specification and maintenance.

Leif Harald Karlsen is a senior lecturer at the University of Oslo and one of the main developers of OTTR.