Abstract
Over the years, there is a growing interest in employing theories from philosophical ontology, cognitive science and linguistics to devise theoretical, methodological and computational tools for conceptual modeling, knowledge representation and domain ontology engineering. In this paper, we discuss one particular kind of such tools, namely, ontological anti-patterns. Ontological anti-patterns are error-problem modeling structures that can create a deviation between the possible and the intended interpretations of an ontology. The contributions of the paper are three-fold. Firstly, we propose some empirically elicited ontological anti-patterns related to the modeling of taxonomic structures. Secondly, we advance a series of rectification plans that can be used to eliminate the occurrence of these anti-patterns in domain ontologies. Finally, we present a model-based computational tool that supports the automated detection, analysis, and elimination of these anti-patterns.