Una arquitectura de referencia para ambientes web de ingeniería ontológica

Ontology authoring, maintenance and use are never easy tasks, mostly due to the complexity of real domains and how they dynamically change as well as different background possessed by modellers about methodologies and formal languages. However, although the needs for ontologies are well-understood, not less important is to provide editing tools to manipulate and understand them. In this context, this work proposes and documents a reference architecture for such tools running in web environments. Moreover, it provides the rationale for boosting the collaborative development of a novel tool based on this architecture, named crowd. Previous surveys reveal that few Webbased ontology engineering environments have been developed and in addition, almost all of them are mere visualisers, with limited graphical features and lacking inference services.La definición, mantenimiento y use de ontologías son tareas difíciles debido, en mayor medida, a la complejidad inherente al mundo real y a como éste cambia dinámicamente. Asimismo, también se debe a las diferencias en conocimiento sobre metodologías y lenguajes formales por parte de los modeladores. Sin embargo, aunque la necesidad de crear y obtener ontologías es clave, es también importante contar con herramientas para manipularlas y entenderlas. Este trabajo propone y documenta una arquitectura de referencia para ambientes Web y ofrece los fundamentos para impulsar el desarrollo colaborativo de la herramienta crowd, la cual esta basada sobre dicha architectura. Revisiones previas de la literatura indican la existencia de un numero reducido ambientes para la Ingeniería Ontológica basados en tecnologías Web, sin embargo, casi en su totalidad son solo visualizadores de modelos con soporte gráfico limitado y ausencia de razonamiento lógico integrado.Facultad de Informátic

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

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

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

Una arquitectura de referencia para ambientes web de ingeniería ontológica

Ontology authoring, maintenance and use are never easy tasks, mostly due to the complexity of real domains and how they dynamically change as well as different background possessed by modellers about methodologies and formal languages. However, although the needs for ontologies are well-understood, not less important is to provide editing tools to manipulate and understand them. In this context, this work proposes and documents a reference architecture for such tools running in web environments. Moreover, it provides the rationale for boosting the collaborative development of a novel tool based on this architecture, named crowd. Previous surveys reveal that few Webbased ontology engineering environments have been developed and in addition, almost all of them are mere visualisers, with limited graphical features and lacking inference services.La definición, mantenimiento y use de ontologías son tareas difíciles debido, en mayor medida, a la complejidad inherente al mundo real y a como éste cambia dinámicamente. Asimismo, también se debe a las diferencias en conocimiento sobre metodologías y lenguajes formales por parte de los modeladores. Sin embargo, aunque la necesidad de crear y obtener ontologías es clave, es también importante contar con herramientas para manipularlas y entenderlas. Este trabajo propone y documenta una arquitectura de referencia para ambientes Web y ofrece los fundamentos para impulsar el desarrollo colaborativo de la herramienta crowd, la cual esta basada sobre dicha architectura. Revisiones previas de la literatura indican la existencia de un numero reducido ambientes para la Ingeniería Ontológica basados en tecnologías Web, sin embargo, casi en su totalidad son solo visualizadores de modelos con soporte gráfico limitado y ausencia de razonamiento lógico integrado.Facultad de Informátic

An analysis and characterisation of publicly available conceptual models

Multiple conceptual data modelling languages exist, with newer version typically having more features to model the universe of discourse more precisely. The question arises, however, to what extent those features are actually used in extant models, and whether characteristic profiles can be discerned. We quantitatively evaluated this with a set of 105 UML Class Diagrams, ER and EER models, and ORM and ORM2 diagrams. When more features are available, they are used, but few times. Only 64\% of the entities are the kind of entities that appear in all three language families. Different profiles are identified that characterise how a typical UML, (E)ER and ORM diagram looks like

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