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An approach to translating OCL invariants into OWL 2 DL axioms for checking inconsistency

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Abstract

Checking the design specification for contradictions at the early phase of the software development process is crucial to ensure that the design is implementable. However, the high expressivity of OCL makes manual inconsistency checking a difficult task. In addition, the developers cannot detect these problems by OCL itself due to its lack of automated reasoning support. We investigate an approach to translating OCL invariants into OWL 2 DL axioms. We do this where the OCL expression contained in an invariant is converted to the corresponding OWL 2 DL class expression in a compositional way. Our approach covers the OCL expressions including four: PrimaryExp, RelationalExp, LogicalExp and IfExp types. Considering the distinction between the CWA and OWA, we achieve correct translation from RelationalExp using closure axiom. Also, we employ an ontology design pattern to overcome the limitations of OWL 2 DL expressivity when translating IfExp. Then inconsistency checking is done through description logic reasoning by the OWL 2 DL high-performance reasoner. We construct an inductive proof to establish the correctness of our translation approach. Moreover, we evaluate our approach using the implemented TUCO tool prototype.

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Acknowledgements

The authors sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments that have led to the present improved version of the original manuscript. The work described in this paper was partially supported by the National Natural Science Key Foundation (Grant No. 91118005), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61173131), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China (Grant No. 106112014CDJZR098801).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Ministry of Education on Dependable Service Computing in Cyber Physical Society, Chongqing City, China

    Chunlei Fu, Dan Yang, Xiaohong Zhang & Haibo Hu

  2. School of Software Engineering, Chongqing University, Chongqing City, China

    Chunlei Fu, Dan Yang, Xiaohong Zhang & Haibo Hu

Authors
  1. Chunlei Fu
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  2. Dan Yang
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  3. Xiaohong Zhang
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  4. Haibo Hu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chunlei Fu.

Appendices

Appendix 1: Description Logic syntax and interpretation for OWL 2 DL class expression

See Table 3.

Table 3 Description logic syntax and interpretation for OWL 2 DL class expression
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Appendix 2: Description logic syntax and interpretation for OWL 2 DL data range

See Tables 4 and 5.

Table 4 Description logic syntax and interpretation for OWL 2 DL data range
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Table 5 Description logic syntax and interpretation for OWL 2 DL datatype restriction
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Appendix 3: Description logic syntax and satisfaction for OWL 2 DL axiom

See Table 6.

Table 6 Description logic syntax and satisfaction for OWL 2 DL axiom
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Appendix 4: Equivalences between OCL expressions

See Figs. 14 and 15.

Fig. 14
figure 14

The equivalences between OCL expressions

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Fig. 15
figure 15

Translating more kinds of PrimaryExp and LogicalExp applying the equivalences between OCL expressions

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Fu, C., Yang, D., Zhang, X. et al. An approach to translating OCL invariants into OWL 2 DL axioms for checking inconsistency. Autom Softw Eng 24, 295–339 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10515-017-0210-9

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