They include the development of theories of wider or narrower scope and the testing and. A software engineering approach, unified process for. Integration of functional and interface requirements of an web based software. A largescale representation of abstract concepts such as actions, time.
Pdf using ontologies in software engineering and technology. Leo obrst, phd suzette stoutenburg kevin cohen jean stanford approved for public release. Pdf towards a formal method for the transformation of ontology. Bgi web gene ontology wego annotation plot beijing genomics institute wego is a useful tool for plotting go annotation results. The purpose of formal representation is to help organisations achieve success by modelling successful organisations. Formal specification the cochrane core ontology describes the entities and concepts that exist in the domain of evidence based healthcare. Various languages and techniques for their definition and use. The software ontology swo is a resource for describing software tools, their types, tasks, versions, provenance and data associated. Problemsolving methods, domainindependent applications, and software agents use ontologies and knowledge bases built from ontologies as data.
Purpose of using ontologies in software engineering. Ontology development is largely aimed at ai experts with knowledge of diverse techniques originating from the field of ai. A vdm based formal approach, proceeding of iasted international conference on software engineering 20, doi. Those who are familiar with the heritage of software development might correctly suggest that the application of formal logic and declarative knowledge representation in systems and software engineering is not new, holding up much good work in the areas of automated software engineering, formal methods, domain theory, relational algebra and. An ontology is a formal and explicit specification of a shared conceptualization. Formally, an ontology is the statement of a logical theory. Modeling ontologies with software engineering techniques and. Formal ontology distills, filters, codifies and organizes the results of descriptive ontology in either its local or global setting.
In the bibliography of ontologies, the adjectives formal, informal and. Ontology driven architectures and potential uses of the. In computer science, specifically software engineering and hardware engineering, formal methods are a. Mike hinchey formal methods formal methods are mathematically based techniques for specification, development and verification of systems, both hardware and software. On the one hand, this leads to a deeper understanding of the relationships between ontologies. Developing an ontology is akin to defining a set of data and their structure for other programs to use. Currently, more than a dozen methods for assessing the quality of ontology are known 5, 6. This is especially impor tant for the control software. Harvesting and reuse of this knowledge is key to success in software organisations. The formal methods used during the development process provide a mechanism for eliminating problems, which are difficult to overcome using other software process models. Swo is a core o n tology developed based on the work of wang and colleagues 20, and captures that. Agile methods offer a number of principles that aim to keep users involved in the process of developing software and enable rapid response to changing requirements whilst also building in consistent quality control checks 32,37.
Logic and ontology stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. We propose a formal method for ontology axioms transformation into application. Formal methods are most likely to be applied to safetycritical or securitycritical software and systems, such as avionics software. Informal ontologies can improve the reliability of software systems by serving as a basis for manual checking of the design against the specification. Ontology driven architectures and potential uses of the semantic. The swo covers areas such as the software type, licence, manufacturer of the software, the input and output data types and the uses i. Software process is a knowledge driven process with subprocesses. An ongoing research project at the tokyo institute of technology is looking at supporting softwarerequirements elicitation and composing software from reusable architectures, frameworks, components and software packages. Formal verification ensures the absence of design errors in a system with respect to systems requirements. Ontology is a system of belief that reflects an interpretation by an individual about what constitutes a. System ontology and its role in software development. The notion of ontology is rather new in software engineering. Knowledge based applications use ontologies for knowledge sharing, which forms the primary use of ontologies.
According to the tom gruber, an ai specialist at stanford university, the definition of an ontology is as follows. In this community, ontology is mainly restricted to the specification of state. An ontologybased approach to support formal verification of. Use of semiformal and formal methods in requirement. We say that an agent commits to an ontology if its observable actions are consistent with the definitions in the ontology. It has got almost worldwide attention through the work in the semantic web community 1, 17. Using ontologies for software development knowledge reuse. According to this interpretation, formal ontology is formal in the sense used by husserl in his logical investigations. It is used for the construction of the cochrane linked data vocabulary containing some 400k terms including interventions drugs, procedures etc, populations age, sex, condition, and clinical outcomes. Software centric innovative methodology for ontology.
In software development, formal methods are mathematical approaches to solving software and hardware problems at the requirements, specification, and design levels. Due to the emergence of the semantic web vision ontologies have been attracting much attention recently. The relevant techniques are developed through the use of. Swo is part of the jisc funded sword project software ontology for resource description, an interdisciplinary effort to capture software descriptions used in the preservation of data.
An ontology is a description like a formal specification of a program of the concepts and relationships that can formally exist. Ontology evaluation, both from a logical and empirical perspective, has also been recognized as a critical phase in ontologicalengineering. The software ontology has adapted agile software engineering methods into the ontology engineering process. Applications of ontologies in software engineering 3 generality. A set of agents that share the same ontology will be able to communicate about a domain of discourse without necessarily operating on a globally shared theory. According to the expressiveness of the formalism used, one can further distinguish lightweight and heavyweight ontologies. L1 meets o2 and o3 formal ontologies are theories that attempt to give precise mathematical formulations of the properties and relations of certain entities. In philosophy, the term formal ontology is used to refer to an ontology defined by axioms in a formal language with the goal to provide an unbiased domain and applicationindependent view on reality, which can help the modeler of domain or applicationspecific ontologies information science to avoid possibly erroneous ontological assumptions encountered in modeling largescale ontologies. There is a longitudinal survey nominal data which takes three snapshots of peoples film viewing habits over time. Ontology engineering in computer science, information science and systems engineering is a field which studies the methods and methodologies for building ontologies. Principles, methods and applications semantic scholar. Aquinas hoboryalenus college and school of computing,national university of singaporehoboryalenus college and school of computing,national university of singapore. Ontologies are used for formal representation of domain knowledge. The formal methods model is concerned with the application of a mathematical technique to design and implement the software.
Ontologies in the software engineering process ceur workshop. An improved use of this knowledge could lead to maximum payoff in software organisations. Removes ambiguity and improves precision to verify that the requirements have been met. Ontology swo and the software process ontology spo 10. Recent software development methodologies such as model. An ontology for software daniel oberle1, stephan grimm2, and ste. This model lays the foundation for developing a complex system and supporting the program development. Methods and goals of philosophical ontology the methods of philosophical ontology are the methods of philosophy in general. Formal methods in software engineering why formalize. Home ontology engineering also called ontology building is a set of tasks related to the development of ontologies for a particular domain. Ontologybased applications in the age of the semantic web. Wolff claimed that ontology was an a priori discipline that could reveal the essences of things, a view strongly criticized later in the 18th century by david hume and immanuel kant.
Formal modeling aspects related to the ontology models are. It is especially suited for heavyweight projects e. Software engineering and formal methods springerlink. The use of formal methods approaches can help to eliminate errors early in the design process. It has been widely used in many important biological research projects, such as the rice genome project yu, j. Ontology and epistemology are two different ways of viewing a research philosophy ontology in business research can be defined as the science or study of being and it deals with the nature of reality. Our goal is to build a common lexicon of design methods applicable to designers across a range of disciplines and domains, to support practitioners in design talking, or the process of conversing with other designers through a. The knowledge generated during the software development. The software ontology swo describes software used in research, primarily bioinformatics.
Ontology and beosin launch first customized formal. Such theories usually propose axioms about these entities in question, spelled out in some formal language based on some system of formal logic. Proceedings of the international conference on formal ontology in. Identity criterion ontology learning core ontology formal axiom competency question these keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. An ontology is the specification of conceptualizations, used to help programs and humans share knowledge. It is a subfield of knowledge engineering that studies the ontology development process, the ontology life cycle, the methods and methodologies for building ontologies. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. Formal model for representing the knowledge base of the software environment the quality of the software environment depends on the quality of the knowledge base training. Being formal in such a sense therefore means dealing with categories like thing, process.