Bridging Software Languages and Ontology Technologies

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

Extend Ecore with OWL by Ecore Annotations of OWL Axioms

Do you want more expressiveness than Ecore can offer?

In this video we show how to use an ecore textual language for annotating ecore metamodels with OWL axioms. Afterwards, you can use the OWLizer to transform metamodel and model into OWL.

OWL + Ecore: Language Bridges

The figure below depicts the general architecture of a language bridge, combining software languages and ontology technologies. The bridge itself is de fined at the M3 layer, where a metametamodel like Ecore is considered and bridged with the OWL metamodel. Here we diff er between two kinds of bridges: M3 Integration Bridge and M3 Transformation Bridge.

Language Bridge

The design of an M3 integration bridge consists mainly of identifying concepts in the Ecore metametamodel and the OWL metamodel which are combined.

The M3 Transformation Bridge allows language designers and language users to achieve representations of software languages (Metamodel/Model) in OWL. It provides the transformation of software language constructs like classes and properties into corresponding OWL constructs.

OWLizer = Software Languages -> OWL Ontologies Part II

The OWLizer transforms software language (Ecore Metamodel/Model) into OWL ontologies. In the following we present an extension of this simple model transformation approach. It is extended by transforming specific EAnnotations to specific OWL constructs. For example by annotating elements in the metamodel with „#Class“- as well as „#ObjectProperty“, EClassifiers and EReferences can be marked as appropriate OWL -Entities. Starting at the „#Class“-EAnnotation, further OWL-Classaxioms can be annotated, that means, by creating further nested EAnnotations.
An example is given in the following:


Here the OWLizer transforming the metamodel (depicted in figure 1) would result the following OWL ontology axioms and class expressions. EquivalentClasses(Cisco7603 ObjectMinCardinality(1 hasConfiguration. Configuration7603)).
Here the OWLizer is able to interpret the annotations and creates corresponding axioms in ontology (e.g. #ObjectMinCardinality means the creation of the corresponding class expressions in the ontology; #EquivalentClasses means the creation of the corresponding axiom).
In general we have built an annotation profile for annotating Ecore-based metamodels. The metamodel itself and in addition its annotations are transformed to a pure ontology by the OWLizer . Thus we extended the expressivity of the Ecore metamodeling language to a new comprehensive approach that combines standard metamodeling with using ontology-based expressions and axioms in an integrated manner.