Our results indicate that although in principle the consensus model cannot guarantee transparent realisations, in practice these are almost always attainable, since ontology developers overwhelmingly favour terms and axioms with relatively simple content.
in an analysis of around 50 ontologies we have found that over 90% of axioms fit a mere seven patterns (table 2); the following examples show that each of these patterns can be verbalised by a clear unambiguous sentence -provided, of course, that no problems arise in lexicalising the atomic terms: since identifiers containing 3-4 words are fairly common (figure 1), we need to consider whether these formulations will remain transparent when combined with more complex lexical entries.