Annotation of Engineering Models by References to Domain Ontologies

Abstract

Complex engineering systems execute within different contexts and domains. The heterogeneity induced by these contexts is usually implicitly handled in the development cycle of such systems. We claim that reducing this heterogeneity can be achieved by handling explicitly the knowledge mined from these domains and contexts. Verification and validation activities are improved due to the expression and verification of new constraints and properties directly extracted from the context and domains associated to the models. In this paper, we advocate the use of domain ontologies to express both domain and context knowledge. We propose to enrich design models that describe complex information systems, with domain knowledge, expressed by ontologies, provided by their context of use. This enrichment is achieved by annotation of the design models by references to ontologies. Three annotation mechanisms are proposed. The resulting annotated models are checked to validate the new minded domain properties. We have experimented this approach in a model driven engineering (MDE) development setting.

Formal Ontology Driven Model Refactoring

“…This section presents a modelling methodology (see Fig. 1), which contains the different modelling steps: domain modelling, system modelling, model annotation and model verification [1], [18]. These modelling steps are described as follows:…”

“…al. [18] have used the similar approach to develop a domain model based on ontology for developing a system model using stepwise development. In [15], authors proposed a generic approach to integrate the domain description formalized by ontologies into an Event-B development process.…”

Formal Modelling of Ontologies : An Event-B based Approach Using the Rodin Platform

“…In the context of the IMPEX project, we have identified two approaches to define ontologies as formal theories. These two approaches use two different modelling processes: shallow [9] and deep modelling [6,7].…”

“…The approach that uses deep modelling consists in modelling the ontology concepts together with the concepts of the modelling language that were used to define the ontology concepts [6,7]. Here, ontologies are defined as instances of ontology models.…”

“…To obtain the definitions of all the formalisation rules defined for the deep modelling process, the reader may refer to these references [6,7]. The OntoEventB plug-in [10] has been developed to automatically support the translation of ontologies models, described using ontology description languages such as OWL [11] or PLIB [8], into Event-B Contexts [1].…”