An ontology design pattern to define explanations

In this paper, we propose an ontology design pattern for the concept of "explanation". The motivation behind this work comes from our research, which focuses on automatically identifying explanations for data patterns. If we want to produce explanations from data agnostically from the appli- cation domain, we first need a formal definition of what an explanation is, i.e. which are its components, their roles or their interactions. We analysed and surveyed works from the disciplines grouped under the name of Cognitive Sciences, with the aim of identifying differences and commonalities in the way their researchers intend the concept of explanation. We then produced not only an ontology design pattern to model it, but also the instantiations of this in each of the analysed disciplines. Besides those contributions, the paper presents how the proposed ontology design pattern can be used to analyse the validity of the explanations produced by our, and other, frameworks.