Ontology-based Modelling for Human and Machine Interpretation and Model-driven Architecture
University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland FHNW, Switzerland
The continuous alignment of business and IT in a rapidly changing environment is a grand challenge for today’s enterprises. Decision-makers use models to understand and analyze a situation, to compare alternatives, and to find solutions. While humans prefer graphical or textual models, semantic annotation makes the knowledge in models machine-interpretable. This presentation describes a meta-modelling approach, which combines human-interpretable graphical enterprise architecture models with machine-interpretable enterprise ontologies. A metamodel which is represented as a formal ontology determines the semantics of the metamodel. Every time a new modelling element is created during modelling, an instance for the corresponding class is created in the ontology. It can be enhanced with an ontology representing the domain of discourse. Thus, models for humans and machines are based on the same internal representation. Ontology-based modelling also supports model-driven architecture, which is based on a step-wise transformation of computation-independent to platform-specific models and finally converted into code.
Lecture at NEMO2024
Date/Time: Thursday, July 18, 2024 at 10:00