Annotation of Engineering Models by References to Domain Ontologies

Abstract

Complex engineering systems execute within different contexts and domains. The heterogeneity induced by these contexts is usually implicitly handled in the development cycle of such systems. We claim that reducing this heterogeneity can be achieved by handling explicitly the knowledge mined from these domains and contexts. Verification and validation activities are improved due to the expression and verification of new constraints and properties directly extracted from the context and domains associated to the models. In this paper, we advocate the use of domain ontologies to express both domain and context knowledge. We propose to enrich design models that describe complex information systems, with domain knowledge, expressed by ontologies, provided by their context of use. This enrichment is achieved by annotation of the design models by references to ontologies. Three annotation mechanisms are proposed. The resulting annotated models are checked to validate the new minded domain properties. We have experimented this approach in a model driven engineering (MDE) development setting.