Extension Rules for Ontology Evolution within a Conceptual Modelling Tool

Ontology development and maintenance are complex tasks, so automatic tools are essential for a successful integration between the modeller’s intention and the formal semantics in an ontology. Never- theless, tools need to provide a way to capture the intuitive structures inherent to the conceptual modelling and to focus on ontology elements currently being refactored by abstracting the user from the whole ontol- ogy without losing consistency. This can be done by means of a set of extension rules that identify elements from an ontology and suggest pos- sible consistent evolutions. Rules guide the development of ontologies by taking source elements and refactoring. In this paper, we present a small catalogue of extension rules to cover these identified requirements and thus to be integrated into a tool for ontological modelling as built- in reasoning services. Each rule is defined and analysed by considering different theories of design patterns.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Extension Rules for Ontology Evolution within a Conceptual Modelling Tool

Ontology development and maintenance are complex tasks, so automatic tools are essential for a successful integration between the modeller’s intention and the formal semantics in an ontology. Never- theless, tools need to provide a way to capture the intuitive structures inherent to the conceptual modelling and to focus on ontology elements currently being refactored by abstracting the user from the whole ontol- ogy without losing consistency. This can be done by means of a set of extension rules that identify elements from an ontology and suggest pos- sible consistent evolutions. Rules guide the development of ontologies by taking source elements and refactoring. In this paper, we present a small catalogue of extension rules to cover these identified requirements and thus to be integrated into a tool for ontological modelling as built- in reasoning services. Each rule is defined and analysed by considering different theories of design patterns.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Extension Rules for Ontology Evolution within a Conceptual Modelling Tool

Ontology development and maintenance are complex tasks, so automatic tools are essential for a successful integration between the modeller’s intention and the formal semantics in an ontology. Never- theless, tools need to provide a way to capture the intuitive structures inherent to the conceptual modelling and to focus on ontology elements currently being refactored by abstracting the user from the whole ontol- ogy without losing consistency. This can be done by means of a set of extension rules that identify elements from an ontology and suggest pos- sible consistent evolutions. Rules guide the development of ontologies by taking source elements and refactoring. In this paper, we present a small catalogue of extension rules to cover these identified requirements and thus to be integrated into a tool for ontological modelling as built- in reasoning services. Each rule is defined and analysed by considering different theories of design patterns.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Knowledge formalization in experience feedback processes : an ontology-based approach

Because of the current trend of integration and interoperability of industrial systems, their size and complexity continue to grow making it more difficult to analyze, to understand and to solve the problems that happen in their organizations. Continuous improvement methodologies are powerful tools in order to understand and to solve problems, to control the effects of changes and finally to capitalize knowledge about changes and improvements. These tools involve suitably represent knowledge relating to the concerned system. Consequently, knowledge management (KM) is an increasingly important source of competitive advantage for organizations. Particularly, the capitalization and sharing of knowledge resulting from experience feedback are elements which play an essential role in the continuous improvement of industrial activities. In this paper, the contribution deals with semantic interoperability and relates to the structuring and the formalization of an experience feedback (EF) process aiming at transforming information or understanding gained by experience into explicit knowledge. The reuse of such knowledge has proved to have significant impact on achieving themissions of companies. However, the means of describing the knowledge objects of an experience generally remain informal. Based on an experience feedback process model and conceptual graphs, this paper takes domain ontology as a framework for the clarification of explicit knowledge and know-how, the aim of which is to get lessons learned descriptions that are significant, correct and applicable

Ontology-based modelling of architectural styles

The conceptual modelling of software architectures is of central importance for the quality of a software system. A rich modelling language is required to integrate the different aspects of architecture modelling, such as architectural styles, structural and behavioural modelling, into a coherent framework. Architectural styles are often neglected in software architectures. We propose an ontological approach for architectural style modelling based on description logic as an abstract, meta-level modelling instrument. We introduce a framework for style definition and style combination. The application of the ontological framework in the form of an integration into existing architectural description notations is illustrated

A Formal Model of Semantic Web Service Ontology (WSMO) Execution

Semantic Web Services have been one of the most significant research areas within the Semantic Web vision, and have been recognized as a promising technology that exhibits huge commercial potential. Current Semantic Web Service research focuses on defining models and languages for the semantic markup of all relevant aspects of services, which are accessible through a Web service interface. The Web Service Modelling Ontology (WSMO) is one of the most significant Semantic Web Service framework proposed to date. To support the standardization and tool support of WSMO, a formal semantics of the language is highly desirable. As there are a few variants of WSMO and it is still under development, the semantics of WSMO needs to be formally defined to facilitate easy reuse and future development. In this paper, we present a formal Object-Z semantics of WSMO. Different aspects of the language have been precisely defined within one unified framework. This model provides a formal unambiguous specification, which can be used to develop tools and facilitate future development

Ontology-driven conceptual modeling: A'systematic literature mapping and review

All rights reserved. Ontology-driven conceptual modeling (ODCM) is still a relatively new research domain in the field of information systems and there is still much discussion on how the research in ODCM should be performed and what the focus of this research should be. Therefore, this article aims to critically survey the existing literature in order to assess the kind of research that has been performed over the years, analyze the nature of the research contributions and establish its current state of the art by positioning, evaluating and interpreting relevant research to date that is related to ODCM. To understand and identify any gaps and research opportunities, our literature study is composed of both a systematic mapping study and a systematic review study. The mapping study aims at structuring and classifying the area that is being investigated in order to give a general overview of the research that has been performed in the field. A review study on the other hand is a more thorough and rigorous inquiry and provides recommendations based on the strength of the found evidence. Our results indicate that there are several research gaps that should be addressed and we further composed several research opportunities that are possible areas for future research

Semantic model-driven development of web service architectures.

Building service-based architectures has become a major area of interest since the advent of Web services. Modelling these architectures is a central activity. Model-driven development is a recent approach to developing software systems based on the idea of making models the central artefacts for design representation, analysis, and code generation. We propose an ontology-based engineering methodology for semantic model-driven composition and transformation of Web service architectures. Ontology technology as a logic-based knowledge representation and reasoning framework can provide answers to the needs of sharable and reusable semantic models and descriptions needed for service engineering. Based on modelling, composition and code generation techniques for service architectures, our approach provides a methodological framework for ontology-based semantic service architecture

Constraint capture and maintenance in engineering design

The Designers' Workbench is a system, developed by the Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) consortium to support designers in large organizations, such as Rolls-Royce, to ensure that the design is consistent with the specification for the particular design as well as with the company's design rule book(s). In the principal application discussed here, the evolving design is described against a jet engine ontology. Design rules are expressed as constraints over the domain ontology. Currently, to capture the constraint information, a domain expert (design engineer) has to work with a knowledge engineer to identify the constraints, and it is then the task of the knowledge engineer to encode these into the Workbench's knowledge base (KB). This is an error prone and time consuming task. It is highly desirable to relieve the knowledge engineer of this task, and so we have developed a system, ConEditor+ that enables domain experts themselves to capture and maintain these constraints. Further we hypothesize that in order to appropriately apply, maintain and reuse constraints, it is necessary to understand the underlying assumptions and context in which each constraint is applicable. We refer to them as “application conditions” and these form a part of the rationale associated with the constraint. We propose a methodology to capture the application conditions associated with a constraint and demonstrate that an explicit representation (machine interpretable format) of application conditions (rationales) together with the corresponding constraints and the domain ontology can be used by a machine to support maintenance of constraints. Support for the maintenance of constraints includes detecting inconsistencies, subsumption, redundancy, fusion between constraints and suggesting appropriate refinements. The proposed methodology provides immediate benefits to the designers and hence should encourage them to input the application conditions (rationales)