Methods for Domain Specialization of Verification-Oriented Process Ontologies

Abstract—

User-friendly formal specification and verification of concurrent and distributed systems for various domains, such as automatic control systems, telecommunications, and business processes, are active research topics due to their practical significance. In this paper, we present methods of developing verification-oriented domain-specific process ontologies used to describe concurrent systems of subject domains. One of the advantages of such ontologies is their formal semantics, which provides formal verification of the described systems. Our method is based on an abstract verification-oriented process ontology. We use two methods of domain specialization of the abstract process ontology. The declarative method relies on specializing classes of the original ontology, introducing new declarative classes, and using a new set of axioms to set restrictions on classes and relations of the abstract ontology. The constructive method uses semantic markup and pattern matching techniques to link domain concepts to classes of the abstract process ontology. We provide detailed ontological specifications for these techniques. Our methods preserve the formal semantics of the original process ontology; therefore, formal verification methods can be applied to the resulting domain-specific process ontologies. We demonstrate that the constructive method is a refined version of the declarative method. We illustrate our methods on the example of constructing an ontology for standard elements of automatic control systems: we develop declarative descriptions of the classes and restrictions of the domain-specific ontology in the Protégé system in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) using inference rules written in the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) and construct a system of semantic markup patterns that implements standard elements of automatic control systems.