Using Ontologies for Semantic Data Integration

While big data analytics is considered as one of the most important paths to competitive advantage of today’s enterprises, data scientists spend a comparatively large amount of time in the data preparation and data integration phase of a big data project. This shows that data integration is still a major challenge in IT applications. Over the past two decades, the idea of using semantics for data integration has become increasingly crucial, and has received much attention in the AI, database, web, and data mining communities. Here, we focus on a specific paradigm for semantic data integration, called Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA). The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of OBDA, pointing out both the techniques that are at the basis of the paradigm, and the main challenges that remain to be addressed

Design Pattern Modeling with Constraint Relaxation

Metamodeling is a widely applied technique in the field of graphical language engineering. Environments supporting metamodeling aid rapid and flexible domain-specific modeling language (DSML) definition and utilization. In software engineering, design patterns are efficient solutions for recurring problems. With the proliferation of DSMLs, there is a need for domain-specific design patterns to offer solutions to problems recurring in different domains. The aim of this paper is to illustrate a concept that integrates modeling patterns into a metamodeling environment. The introduced approach utilizes the modeling functionalities of the environment; a visual design pattern metamodel, a system architectural metamodel extended with textual constraints are introduced. Furthermore, design patterns are validated against relaxed constraints defined in the metamodel to only allow the creation of patterns that can be extended to valid instance models

On Formalizing UML and OCL Features and Their Employment to Runtime Verification

Model-driven development (MDD) has been identified as a promising approach for developing software. By using abstract models of a system and by generating parts of the system out of these models, one tries to improve the efficiency of the overall development process and the quality of the resulting software. In the context of MDD the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and its related textual Object Constraint Language (OCL) have gained a high recognition. To be able to generate systems of high quality and to allow for interoperability between modeling tools, a well-defined semantics for these languages is required. This thesis summarizes published work in this context that employs an endogenous metamodeling approach to define the semantics of newer elements of the UML. While the covered elements are exhaustively used to define relations between elements of the metamodel of the UML, the UML specification leaves out a precise definition of their semantics. Our proposed approach uses models, not only to define the abstract syntax, but also to define the semantics of UML. By using UML and OCL for this, existing modeling tools can be used to validate the definition. The second part of this thesis covers work on the usage of UML and OCL models for runtime verification. It is shown how models can still be used at the end of a software development process, i. e., after an implementation has manually been added to generated parts, even though they are not used as central parts of the development process. This work also influenced the integration of protocol state machines into a modeling tool, which lead to publications about the runtime semantics of state machines and the capabilities to declaratively specify behavior using state machines

Metamodeling and metaquerying in OWL 2 QL

OWL 2 QL is a standard profile of the OWL 2 ontology language, specifically tailored to Ontology-Based Data Management. Inspired by recent work on higher-order Description Logics, in this paper we present a new semantics for OWL 2 QL ontologies, called Metamodeling Semantics (MS), and show that, in contrast to the official Direct Semantics (DS) for OWL 2, it allows exploiting the metamodeling capabilities natively offered by the OWL 2 punning. We then extend unions of conjunctive queries with both metavariables, and the possibility of using TBox atoms, with the purpose of expressing meaningful metalevel queries. We first show that under MS both satisfiability checking and answering queries including only ABox atoms, have the same complexity as under DS. Second, we investigate the problem of answering general metaqueries, and single out a new source of complexity coming from the combined presence of a specific type of incompleteness in the ontology, and of TBox axioms among the query atoms. Then we focus on a specific class of ontologies, called TBox-complete, where there is no incompleteness in the TBox axioms, and show that general metaquery answering in this case has again the same complexity as under DS. Finally, we move to general ontologies and show that answering general metaqueries is coNP-complete with respect to ontology complexity, Π2p-complete with respect to combined complexity, and remains AC0 with respect to ABox complexity

A formal framework for model management

El Desarrollo de Software Dirigido por Modelos es una rama de la Ingeniería del Software en la que los artefactos software se representan como modelos para incrementar la productividad, calidady eficiencia económica en el proceso de desarrollo de software, donde un modelo proporciona una representación abstracta del código final de una aplicación. En este campo, la iniciativa Model-Driven Architecture (MDA), patrocinada por la OMG, está constituida por una familia de estándares industriales, entre los que se destacan: Meta-Object Facility (MOF), Unified Modeling Language (UML), Object Constraint Language (OCL), XML Metadata Interchange (XMI), y Query/Views/Transformations (QVT). Estos estándares proporcionan unas directrices comunes para herramientas basadas en modelos y para procesos de desarrollo de software dirigidos por modelos. Su objetivo consiste en mejorar la interoperabilidad entre marcos de trabajo ejecutables, en automatizar el proceso desarrollo de software de software y en proporcionar técnicas que eviten errores durante ese proceso. El estándar MOF describe un marco de trabajo genérico que permite definir la sintaxis abstracta de lenguajes de modelado. Este estándar persigue la definición de los conceptos básicos que son utilizados en procesos de desarrollo de software dirigidos por modelos: que es un modelo, que es un metamodelo, qué es reflexión en un marco de trabajo basado en MOF, etc. Sin embargo, la mayoría de estos conceptos carecen de una semántica formal en la versión actual del estándar MOF. Además, OCL se utiliza como un lenguage de definición de restricciones que permite añadir semántica a un metamodelo MOF. Desafortunadamente, la relación entre un metamodelo y sus restricciones OCL también carece de una semántica formal. Este hecho es debido, en parte, a que los metamodelos solo pueden ser definidos como dato en un marco de trabajo basado en MOF. El estándar MOF también proporciona las llamadas facilidades de reflexión de MOF (MOF ReflectiBoronat Moll, A. (2007). A formal framework for model management [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/1964Palanci

A Detailed Comparison of UML and OWL

As models and ontologies assume an increasingly central role in software and information systems engineering, the question of how exactly they compare and how they can sensibly be used together assumes growing importance. However, no study to date has systematically and comprehensively compared the two technology spaces, and a large variety of different bridging and integration ideas have been proposed in recent years without any detailed analysis of whether they are sound or useful. In this paper, we address this problem by providing a detailed and comprehensive comparison of the two technology spaces in terms of their flagship languages – UML and OWL – each a de facto and de jure standard in its respective space. To fully analyze the end user experience, we perform the comparison at two levels – one considering the underlying boundary assumptions and philosophy adopted by each language and the other considering their detailed features. We also consider all relevant auxiliary languages such as OCL. The resulting comparison clarifies the relationship between the two technologies and provides a solid foundation for deciding how to use them together or integrate them

Formally Defining and Iterating Infinite Models

International audienceThe wide adoption of MDE raises new situations where we need to manipulate very large models or even infinite model streams gathered at runtime. These new uses cases for MDE raise challenges that had been unforeseen by the time standard modeling framework were designed. This paper proposes a formal definition of an infinite model, as well as a formal framework to reason on queries over infinite models. This formal query definition aims at supporting the design and verification of operations that manipulate infinite models. First, we precisely identify the MOF parts which must be refined to support infinite structure. Then, we provide a formal coinductive definition dealing with unbounded and potentially infinite graph-based structure