Bridging Software Languages and Ontology Technologies: Tutorial at SPLASH 2010

Current 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 strengthen semantics in modeling and metamodeling 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 semantic web technologies for enabling shared terminologies and automated reasoning provide means for leveraging metamodeling and language engineering.

This tutorial on Bridging Software Languages and Ontology Technologies  at SPLASH 2010 enlightens the potential of ontology and semantic web technology for modeling and metamodeling in software development, positioning it among modeling standards like UML, and MOF; and (2) illustrates ontology-enabled software development with real application scenarios in areas like software design patterns, domain-specific languages and variability management.

Model Driven Engineering with Ontology Technologies

Ontologies constitute formal models of some aspect of the world that may be used for drawing interesting logical conclusions even for large models. Software models capture relevant characteristics of a software artifact to be developed, yet, most often these software models have no formal semantics, or the underlying (often graphical) software language varies from case to case in a way that makes it hard if not impossible to fix its semantics.

At the Reasoning Web Summer School 2010: Semantic Technologies for Software Engineering we present a lecture on the use of ontology technologies for software modeling in order to carry over advantages from ontology technologies to the software modeling domain. It will turn out that ontology-based metamodels constitute a core means for exploiting expressive ontology reasoning in the software modeling domain while remaining flexible enough to accommodate varying needs of software modelers.

Ecore Models | Metamodels -> OWL Ontologies = OWLizer

We show how to use TwoUse's OWLizer to transform Ecore Models and Metamodels into OWL ontologies. In this example, the UML class diagram model elements are transformed into OWL individuals of the UML ontology and the UML metamodel classes are transformed into OWL classes.

UML + OWL Ontology and SPARQL

This demo of the TwoUse Toolkit shows UML class diagram, OWL ontology and SPARQL to dynamically classify instances at runtime. We model the variations of the class SalesOrder with the web ontology language, namely USSalesOrder and GermanSalesOrder. Later, we write a query operation that asks for the most specific type of the contextual object.

BPMN process model -> OWL ontology = Validating Process Refinements

"A crucial task in business process management is the validation of business process refinements. A business process refinement is a process description in a more fine-grained representation. The refinement is either with respect to an abstract model or with respect to component's principle behavior model. This video shows a process refinement based on the execution set semantics. Predecessor and successor relations of the activities are described in an OWL ontology in which the refinement is represented and validated by concept satisfiability checking."

More information on this paper

OWL ontology with UML Class Diagram Profile for OWL

How to create a simple OWL ontology using the OMG UML Profile for OWL with the TwoUse Toolkit.

Improving Software Design Patterns with UML, OWL and SPARQL

We deal with problems in common design patterns and proposes OWL to remedy these issues. We exploit the TwoUse approach, which integrates OWL and UML class diagrams to overcome drawbacks of the Strategy Pattern, that are also extensible to the Abstract Factory Pattern.