solutions for semantic web (OWL ontologies, SPARQL, reasoning) and model driven development (metamodel, model design, model transformation, code generation)

Templates in OWL Ontologies

| Friday, September 10, 2010

Towards Hybrid Reasoning for Verifying and Validating Multilevel Models

| Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Ontologies and its reasoning services are expected to play an important role in many application domains, as well as in software engineering in general. In model-driven engineering (MDE), models, like UML models, represent and specify software systems.

One problem with using ontologies within software engineering is that while model-driven engineering realizes a four-layer metamodelling architecture, the new version of OWL Web Ontology Language, called OWL 2, it supports only simple metamodelling. Moreover, the semantics of metamodelling in OWL 2 corresponds to the contextual semantics which leads to non-intuitive results. Another issue is that the Open World Assumption (OWA) assumes a model is incomplete. Therefore, we could not validate some constrains in OWA.

We demonstrate multilevel (meta-) modelling using ontologies described in OWL FA, which has a well defined fixed-layered architecture and semantics. As well as an approach to integrate Closed World Assumption (CWA) with OWA in order to use both assumptions for verifying and validating multilevel model.

This joint work with the University of Aberdeen will be presented
at the EKAW conference, October, Lisbon

Specialization and Validation of Statecharts in OWL

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It is germane in the engineering process of knowledge bases to represent a model on different abstraction levels, developed and refined by different engineers. Hence, they are initially described at a level of coarse granularity and then refined into a more specific representation.

Given two behavior models like statecharts, it is a challenging task to decide whether one statechart is still a valid specialization of the other, more abstract model. We use OWL to model statecharts and to validate statechart specializations.

This work will be presented at the EKAW conference in October
in Lisbon.

Bridging Software Languages and Ontology Technologies

| Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Today's model-driven development approaches allow for a more productive way of developing software systems. However, building tools and languages for software development still suffer a neglect of semantics in modeling and metamodeling.

An interest to extend software languages that gained scientific and commercial attention is the integration of ontology technology and software development. Ontology formalisms for consistency validation and dynamic classification as well as ontology technologies to enable shared terminologies, automated reasoning, provide means for leveraging metamodeling and language engineering.

Check out our tutorial at SPLASH 2010 (previously OOPSLA) on Bridging Software Languages and Ontology Technologies