Towards Conceptual Modelling Interoperability in a Web Tool for Ontology Engineering

The definition of suitable visual paradigms for ontology modelling is still an open issue. Despite obvious differences between the expressiveness of conceptual modelling (CM) languages and ontologies, many proposed tools have been based on UML, EER and ORM. Additionally, all of these tools support only one CM as visual language, reducing even more their modelling capabilities. In previous works, we have presented crowd as a Web architecture for graphical ontology designing in UML and logical reasoning to verify the relevant properties of these models. The aim of this tool is to extend the reasoning capabilities on top of visual representations as much as possible. In this paper, we present an extended crowd architecture and a new prototype focusing on an ontology-driven metamodel to enable different CMs visual languages for ontology modelling. Thus facilitating inter-model assertions across models represented in different languages, converting between modelling languages and reasoning on them. Finally, we detail the new architecture and demonstrate the usage of the prototype with simple examples.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Uniform management of heterogeneous semi-structured information sources

Nowadays, data can be represented and stored by using different formats ranging from non structured data, typical of file systems, to semi-structured data, typical of Web sources, to highly structured data, typical of relational database systems. Therefore, the necessity arises to define new tools and models for uniformly handling all these heterogeneous information sources. In this paper we propose both a framework and a conceptual model which aim at uniformly managing information sources having different nature and structure for obtaining a global, integrated and uniform representation. We show also how the proposed framework and the conceptual model can be useful in many application contexts