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Grounding Software Domain Ontologies in the Unified
Foundational Ontology (UFO): The case of the ODE Software
Process Ontology
Giancarlo GuizzardiRenata S.S. Guizzardi
Ontological Modeling Research Group (NEMO),Computer Science Department,
UFES, Vitoria/ES, Brazil
i* Internal WorkshopBarcelona, Spain
July, 2010
Formal Ontology (Husserl)
An interdisciplinary area comprising results from Philosophical Ontology, Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Philosophical Logic to develop a number of domain-independent sub-theories (e.g., theory of parts and wholes, theory of properties and relations, classification and taxonomic structures, identity, existential dependence, etc.), which are able to characterize aspects of real-world entities irrespective of their particular nature.
End Result: Foundational Ontologies
Foundational and Material Ontologies
• Material Ontologies: Set of categories whose existence is to be admitted in specific domain (e.g. Molecular Biology)
• A Foundational Ontology thus supply a set of (meta-) categories which can be used in the development of material ontologies
What is an Ontology?
• Information Systems/Data Modeling view: the same idea as in Philosophy. For years, (Foundational) Ontologies have been used to evaluate and re-design conceptual modeling grammars.
• Artificial Intelligence: a representation of a singular domain (e.g., molecular biology, finance, logistics,ceramic materials) expressed in knowledge representation (e.g.,RDF, OWL, F-Logic) or conceptual modeling lanuguage (e.g., UML, EER).
Ontoogies in Software Engineering
• ODE (mid-90’s): ontologies as representations of software engineering domains such as Software Process, Software Quality, Software Artifacts,etc...
• Ontologies have been used in that context as precise domain models (in the domain engineering sense) which have been used to develop OO frameworks that are integrated in a semantic SEE.
Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO)
UFO-A (STRUCTURAL ASPECTS)(Objects, their types, their parts/wholes,
the roles they play, their intrinsic and relational properties
Property value spaces…)
UFO-B (DYNAMIC ASPECTS)(Events and their parts,
Relations between events,Object participation in events,
Temporal properties of entities, Time…)
UFO-C (SOCIAL ASPECTS)(Agents, Intentional States, Goals, Actions,
Norms, Social Commitments/Claims, Social Dependency Relations…)
UFO-A: Structural Aspects
Quality Structures
Qualia and Quality Dimensions
Externally Dependent Moments
j1
j2
j3
m1
m2
m3
JohnMary
Externally Dependent Moments
j1
j2
j3
m1
m2
m3
JohnMaryJohn-qua-husband
Mary-qua-wife
Externally Dependent Moments
j1
j2
j3
m1
m2
m3
JohnMary
Marriage1
Situation
JohnMary
Marriage2
UFPE
Employment1
Situation1
UFO-B: Dynamic Aspects
Allen’s Relationsb
a
a
a
a
a
a
a before b
a meets b
a overlaps b
a starts b
a during b
a finishes b
a a equals b
begin end
UFO-C: Social Aspects
UFO-C: Actions, Plans and Scheduled Actions
Action(Occurences), Action Universals and Scheduled Actions
• As a result of our analysis we can make clear that scheduled actions are neither action occurences nor action universals. In fact, they are not actions at all!
• Scheduled actions are commitments to instantiate specific action universals at specific time intervals, i.e., closed appointments!
Analyzing and Re-Designing a Software Process Ontology
The ODE Software Process Ontology
• The basis for the development of a process infrastructure for ODE, a Process-Centered Software Engineering Environment.
• It has been shown to be expressive enough to be used as a common ground for mapping the software process fragments of standards such as ISO/IEC 12207-ISO 9001:2000-ISO/IEC 15504, CMMI, RUP and SPEM.
Final Considerations
• We presented the latest developments in the UFO foundational ontology.
• We demonstrate how UFO can be used to evaluate, re-design and give real-world semantics to an ontology in the software engineering domain (the ODE Software Process Ontology).
Acknowledgements
This research is funded by the Brazilian ResearchFunding Agencies FAPES (grant number 45444080/09) and
CNPq (grants number 481906/2009-6)
Final Considerations
• This process has been applied in the analysis and re-design of other reference models (e.g., ITIL).
• The intention is to apply to the other Software Engineering Ontologies in the ODE Environment in order to build a body of explicitly defined SE ontological base comprising a set of well-grounded domain theories.