On marrying ontological and metamodeling technical spaces
In software engineering, the use of models and metamodeling approaches (e.g., MDA with MOF/UML) for purposes such as software design or software validation is an established practice. Ontologies constitute domain models formalized using expressive logic languages for class definitions and rules. Hence, when seen from an abstract point of view, the two paradigms and their various technological spaces seem closely related. However, in the state-of-the-art research and practice the two technologies are just beginning to converge and the relationship between the two is still under exploration. In this paper, we give an outline of current ontology technologies, such as the Semantic Web standards…
Model Driven Specification of Ontology Translations
The alignment of different ontologies requires the specification, representation and execution of translation rules. The rules need to integrate translations at the lexical, the syntactic and the semantic layer requiring semantic reasoning as well as low-level specification of ad-hoc conversions of data. Existing formalisms for representing translation rules cannot cover the representation needs of these three layers in one model. We propose a metamodel-based representation of ontology alignments that integrate semantic translations using description logics and lower level translation specifications into one model of representation for ontology alignments.