Drawing OWL 2 ontologies with Eddy the editor

In this paper we introduce Eddy, a new open-source tool for the graphical editing of OWL~2 ontologies. Eddy is specifically designed for creating ontologies in Graphol, a completely visual ontology language that is equivalent to OWL~2. Thus, in Eddy ontologies are easily drawn as diagrams, rather than written as sets of formulas, as commonly happens in popular ontology design and engineering environments. This makes Eddy particularly suited for usage by people who are more familiar with diagramatic languages for conceptual modeling rather than with typical ontology formalisms, as is often required in non-academic and industrial contexts. Eddy provides intuitive functionalities for specifying Graphol diagrams, guarantees their syntactic correctness, and allows for exporting them in standard OWL 2 syntax. A user evaluation study we conducted shows that Eddy is perceived as an easy and intuitive tool for ontology specification

A framework for semantic checking of information systems

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresIn this day and age, enterprises often find that their business benefits greatly if they collaborate with others in order to be more competitive and productive. However these collaborations often come with some costs since the worldwide diversity of communities has led to the development of various knowledge representation elements, namely ontologies that, in most cases, are not semantically equivalent. Consequently, even though some enterprises may operate in the same domain, they can have different representations of that same knowledge. However, even after solving this issue and establishing a semantic alignment with other systems, they do not remain unchanged. Subsequently, a regular check of its semantic alignment is needed. To aid in the resolution of this semantic interoperability problem, the author proposes a framework that intends to provide generic solutions and a mean to validate the semantic consistency of ontologies in various scenarios, thus maintaining the interoperability state between the enrolled systems

Flexible Views for View-based Model-driven Development

Modern software development faces the problem of fragmentation of information across heterogeneous artefacts in different modelling and programming languages. In this dissertation, the Vitruvius approach for view-based engineering is presented. Flexible views offer a compact definition of user-specific views on software systems, and can be defined the novel ModelJoin language. The process is supported by a change metamodel for metamodel evolution and change impact analysis

Towards a uniform user interface for editing data shapes

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Model-Driven Methodology for Rapid Deployment of Smart Spaces based on Resource-Oriented Architectures

Advances in electronics nowadays facilitate the design of smart spaces based on physical mash-ups of sensor and actuator devices. At the same time, software paradigms such as Internet of Things (IoT) and Web of Things (WoT) are motivating the creation of technology to support the development and deployment of web-enabled embedded sensor and actuator devices with two major objectives: (i) to integrate sensing and actuating functionalities into everyday objects, and (ii) to easily allow a diversity of devices to plug into the Internet. Currently, developers who are applying this Internet-oriented approach need to have solid understanding about specific platforms and web technologies. In order to alleviate this development process, this research proposes a Resource-Oriented and Ontology-Driven Development (ROOD) methodology based on the Model Driven Architecture (MDA). This methodology aims at enabling the development of smart spaces through a set of modeling tools and semantic technologies that support the definition of the smart space and the automatic generation of code at hardware level. ROOD feasibility is demonstrated by building an adaptive health monitoring service for a Smart Gym

a survey

Building ontologies in a collaborative and increasingly community-driven fashion has become a central paradigm of modern ontology engineering. This understanding of ontologies and ontology engineering processes is the result of intensive theoretical and empirical research within the Semantic Web community, supported by technology developments such as Web 2.0. Over 6 years after the publication of the first methodology for collaborative ontology engineering, it is generally acknowledged that, in order to be useful, but also economically feasible, ontologies should be developed and maintained in a community-driven manner, with the help of fully-fledged environments providing dedicated support for collaboration and user participation. Wikis, and similar communication and collaboration platforms enabling ontology stakeholders to exchange ideas and discuss modeling decisions are probably the most important technological components of such environments. In addition, process-driven methodologies assist the ontology engineering team throughout the ontology life cycle, and provide empirically grounded best practices and guidelines for optimizing ontology development results in real-world projects. The goal of this article is to analyze the state of the art in the field of collaborative ontology engineering. We will survey several of the most outstanding methodologies, methods and techniques that have emerged in the last years, and present the most popular development environments, which can be utilized to carry out, or facilitate specific activities within the methodologies. A discussion of the open issues identified concludes the survey and provides a roadmap for future research and development in this lively and promising field

Methodologies, tools and languages for building ontologies. Where is their meeting point?

In this paper we review and compare the main methodologies, tools and languages for building ontologies that have been reported in the literature, as well as the main relationships among them. Ontology technology is nowadays mature enough: many methodologies, tools and languages are already available. The future work in this field should be driven towards the creation of a common integrated workbench for ontology developers to facilitate ontology development, exchange, evaluation, evolution and management, to provide methodological support for these tasks, and translations to and from different ontology languages. This workbench should not be created from scratch, but instead integrating the technology components that are currently available

Collaborative ontology engineering: a survey

Building ontologies in a collaborative and increasingly community-driven fashion has become a central paradigm of modern ontology engineering. This understanding of ontologies and ontology engineering processes is the result of intensive theoretical and empirical research within the Semantic Web community, supported by technology developments such as Web 2.0. Over 6 years after the publication of the first methodology for collaborative ontology engineering, it is generally acknowledged that, in order to be useful, but also economically feasible, ontologies should be developed and maintained in a community-driven manner, with the help of fully-fledged environments providing dedicated support for collaboration and user participation. Wikis, and similar communication and collaboration platforms enabling ontology stakeholders to exchange ideas and discuss modeling decisions are probably the most important technological components of such environments. In addition, process-driven methodologies assist the ontology engineering team throughout the ontology life cycle, and provide empirically grounded best practices and guidelines for optimizing ontology development results in real-world projects. The goal of this article is to analyze the state of the art in the field of collaborative ontology engineering. We will survey several of the most outstanding methodologies, methods and techniques that have emerged in the last years, and present the most popular development environments, which can be utilized to carry out, or facilitate specific activities within the methodologies. A discussion of the open issues identified concludes the survey and provides a roadmap for future research and development in this lively and promising fiel

ChImp:Visualizing Ontology Changes and their Impact in Protégé

Today, ontologies are an established part of many applications and research. However, ontologies evolve over time, and ontology editors---engineers and domain experts---need to be aware of the consequences of changes while editing. Ontology editors might not be fully aware of how they are influencing consistency, quality, or the structure of the ontology, possibly causing applications to fail. To support editors and increase their sensitivity towards the consequences of their actions, we conducted a user survey to elicit preferences for representing changes, e.g., with ontology metrics such as number of classes and properties. Based on the survey, we developed ChImp---a Protégé plug-in to display information about the impact of changes in real-time. During editing of the ontology, ChImp lists the applied changes, checks and displays the consistency status, and reports measures describing the effect on the structure of the ontology. Akin to software IDEs and integrated testing approaches, we hope that displaying such metrics will help to improve ontology evolution processes in the long run