Classes versus Individuals: Fundamental Design Issues for Ontologies on the Biomedical Semantic Web

Most entities in biological discourse are in fact classes and not singular entities. This complicates the ontological description of biomedical reality in the Web Ontology Language (OWL), which is one of the fundamental standards of the Semantic Web While the class-like nature of most biological entities seems to necessitate the use of OWL classes to describe biological reality in a consistent manner, this approach is not practically feasible for several reasons. I propose the use of OWL individuals together with special properties (the 'CASA property pattern') to overcome these problems.