  We present a second-order language that can be used to succinctly specify
ontologies in a consistent and transparent manner. This language is based on
ontology templates (OTTR), a framework for capturing recurring patterns of
axioms in ontological modelling. The language and our results are independent
of any specific DL. We define the language and its semantics, including the
case of negation-as-failure, investigate reasoning over ontologies specified
using our language, and show results about the decidability of useful reasoning
tasks about the language itself. We also state and discuss some open problems
that we believe to be of interest.
