UML-based DEMO Profiles as Metaconcepts for Interlocking Institutional Worlds

An information system supporting an organisation is based on concepts from the organisation\u27s institutional world. An institutional world consists of a collection of speech acts and institutional facts . For a group of information systems to interoperate, the organizations responsible for these systems must first agree on what the words mean in the interoperation. This agreement is called an ontology. The ontology is generally defined as an explicit specification of a conceptualization . One of the major uses of ontology is to support interoperation of information systems. Many institutions whose systems are to interoperate are not fully autonomous; they do sometimes cooperate with each other, so that their institutional worlds will interlock therefore interlocking ontologies . Modeling interlocking institutional worlds (IWs) requires a dedicated representation system that gives a formal model which is the specification of institutional facts as well as the specification of speech acts . The ontology is the specification of institutional facts. However, we do not have a system that can give a formal model for the speech acts. Therefore, this paper adopts a synthesis approach to propose the UML extension for modeling speech acts in the context of interlocking institutional worlds. DEMO is one of the most popular Language Action Paradigms (LAP)-based methodologies based on speech act theory so is close to the concept of IWs. The UML is a standard modelling language in the world of information system development and currently there is a growing interest in its adoption as a language for conceptual modeling and business process representation. Taking advantage of the fact that UML is an OMG standard and its use is growing quickly, this paper proposes UML-based DEMO profiles purposely for modelling IWs

Representation of safety standards with semantic technologies used in industrial environments

Proceedings of: 36th International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security, (SAFECOMP 2017). Trento, Italy, September 13-15, 2017Understanding and following safety standards with their text can be difficult. Ambiguity and inconsistency, among other issues, can easily arise. As a solution, several authors argue for the explicit representation of the standards with models, which can be created with semantic technologies such as ontologies. However, this possibility has received little attention. The few authors that have addressed it have also only dealt with a subset of safety standard aspects and have used technologies not usually applied for critical systems engineering. As a first step towards addressing these issues, this position paper presents our initial work on the representation of safety standards with Knowledge Manager, a tool used in industrial environments that exploits semantic technologies to manage domain information. The proposal also builds on prior work on the specification of safety compliance needs with a holistic generic metamodel. We describe how to use Knowledge Manager to specify the concepts and relationships of the metamodel for a given safety standard, and discuss the application and benefits of the corresponding representation.The research leading to this paper has received funding from the AMASS project (H2020-ECSEL no. 692474; Spain’s MINECO ref. PCIN-2015-262)