Ontologies for RDF structures, not just atoms

I did not participate in this forum before, but now I was looking for a place to ask a question of the type
"Did anybody hear anything about..." and found this forum appropriate. So, here it goes.

OWL is all about defining concepts corresponding to classes of resources:
e.g. "Person", "Woman", "Husband",  "Mother", etc.
But what about a concept like "Couple"?
I bet you understand what I mean by this word, and this means that this concept is a part of
an ontology we share. The meaning of "couple" is very simple: there is John, there is Mary,
and there is some ex:dates link between them. But OWL is useless for defining this concept - of course,
unless we introduce a couple as a resource, define a couple of properties to link John and Mary
to this resource, and add these all explicitly to the linked data space - which is, I believe,
is unnatural and not feasible at a scale.

In other words, I speak about an ontology of concepts that correspond to RDF fragments
(structures, sub-graphs) rather than just RDF atoms.

In past few years, I found myself designing and using some ad-hoc frameworks for such ontologies
in two different projects and, therefore, contexts. One was about interpretation of RDF-encoded mental
structures (beliefs, intentions) and communications (speech acts) in multi-agent systems. The other, current,
is about interpretation of RDF-encoded software models. In both cases, the problem in nutshell is
the following: there is an RDF graph for something and we want to detect if a certain "situation"
occurs in it - to make some conclusions based on that. It is like answering a question about if there are
any couples in a group of people. As "situation" of interest are many, we want to have a formal ontology of those.
In other words, I believe that the applications where the problem occurs can be rather widespread.

I plan to work on this further, maybe to generalize on the approaches I used before.

I wanted to ask for any tips about related previous research, discussions, postponed issues in
standard-setting groups. Anyone is familiar with anything like this?
Please comment also on the problem as such.
Thanks in advance

Artem Katasonov
VTT Techncal Research Center, Finland