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Toward a formal research framework for ontological analyses

Published: 01 April 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Ontological analyses have been used in numerous publications to compare existing modelling grammars with an ontology. However, a sound theoretical research framework is still missing. Consequently, working with the results of such ontological analyses is theoretically questionable. Therefore, the aim of this paper is threefold. Firstly, we want to contribute to such a theoretical research framework by formalising the ontological analyses approach as sets of mathematical functions between ontological and modelling grammar constructs. Secondly, on this basis, we derive four formal requirements each ontological analyses must comply with. Thirdly, we analyse whether current state of the art ontological analyses comply with our findings. While the formalisation demonstrates the strengths of the ontological analysis approach we conclude that current analyses have theoretical deficiencies, which lead to serious limitations in their application. Lastly, we demonstrate the usefulness of our formal framework by describing a new application. This application uses two different ontological analyses as input and produces mappings between the modelling grammars used in these analyses as output.

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Published In

cover image Advanced Engineering Informatics
Advanced Engineering Informatics  Volume 21, Issue 2
April, 2007
116 pages

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Elsevier Science Publishers B. V.

Netherlands

Publication History

Published: 01 April 2007

Author Tags

  1. BWW ontology
  2. Modelling grammar comparison
  3. Ontological analysis

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  • (2016)Language design and implementation for the domain of coding conventionsProceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering10.1145/2997364.2997386(90-104)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2016
  • (2016)Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language EngineeringundefinedOnline publication date: 20-Oct-2016
  • (2013)Creating Ontologies Using Ontology MappingsProceedings of the 2013 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conferences on Web Intelligence (WI) and Intelligent Agent Technologies (IAT) - Volume 0310.1109/WI-IAT.2013.169(143-146)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2013
  • (2009)Evaluating the Visual Syntax of UMLSoftware Language Engineering10.1007/978-3-642-00434-6_3(16-34)Online publication date: 24-Mar-2009

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