ER2013

KSE Lab Meeting December 2013

Paper 1: Ontologies for International Standards for Software Engineering

• Addresses issue of terminological and semantic differences between International standards

• The solution: A hierarchy of ontologies that begin at the foundational level and then become more specific for a single or group of standards/technical working groups

Authors: Brian Henderson-Sellers, Tom McBride - Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology, SydneyGraham Low - School of Information Systems, Technology and Management, University of New South WalesCesar Gonzalez-Perez - Institute of Heritage Sciences (Incipit), Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)

Core Structure

• Create a foundational ontology sourced from ontology engineering field e.g. sortals– DEO – Definitional Element Ontology• Represents a taxonomy of rigorously defined terms and

the relationships between them

– CDO stands for Configured Domain Ontology• Effectively a customised “copy” of the DEO

– SDO stands for Standard Domain Ontology• A metamodel that a standard or technical working

groups can instantiate to build their own ontologyAuthors: Brian Henderson-Sellers, Tom McBride - Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology, Sydney

Graham Low - School of Information Systems, Technology and Management, University of New South WalesCesar Gonzalez-Perez - Institute of Heritage Sciences (Incipit), Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)

Paper 2: Semantic-Based Mappings

• Traditionally mappings are developed between source and target schema

• Investigates how the mapping process changes when a conceptual schema for a target database is available

• Contribution– Employs non-recursive Datalog with limited negation– Rewrite algorithm based on the idea of unfolding views

in mapping conclusions• More complex when view definition language allows negation

Authors: Giansalvatore Mecca - Universit`a della Basilicata – Potenza, ItalyGuillem Rull, Ernest Teniente - Universitat Polit`ecnica de Catalunya – Barcelona, SpainDonatello Santoro - Universit`a Roma Tre – Roma, Italy

• Mappings represented using tgds and egds• Evaluation based on following factors

– Effectiveness• Compares size of the source-to-semantic mapping users need to

specify vs auto-generated mappings• Auto-generated increases size of dependency graph by an average 70%

– Scalability• Large Scenarios testing unfolding algorithm with increasing levels of

negation– Source level relations ranged from 10k – 80k– View definitions ranged from 30k – 240k– Target level relations ranged from 60k – 480k– Results do not exceed 0.9 secs compared to standard algorithms which take

hours for small scenarios

– Large Datasets• Scales well (up to 1 million database tuples)

Authors: Giansalvatore Mecca - Universit`a della Basilicata – Potenza, ItalyGuillem Rull, Ernest Teniente - Universitat Polit`ecnica de Catalunya – Barcelona, SpainDonatello Santoro - Universit`a Roma Tre – Roma, Italy

Paper 3: Towards Ontological Foundations for the Conceptual Modeling of Events

• Goal: To provide a more rigorous ontological account of events

• Motivation– To provide a more complete ontological account of events

• Extends Unified Foundational Ontology: UFO-B• Formalises

– Notion of events as manifestations of object dispositions– parthood in events– Temporal relations– Situations (bound to specific time-points)

Authors: Giancarlo Guizzardi, Ricardo de Almeida Falbo, Renata S.S. Guizzardi and Joao Paulo A. AlmeidaOntology and Conceptual Modelling Research Group (NEMO), Fed. Uni. of Espírito Santo (UFES), BrazilGerd Wagner - Institute of Informatics, Brandenburg University of Technology, Germany

• Contribution(s)– Extends previous ontological treatment of events

from previous work– Provides a comprehensive axiomatisation

• Relevance to my research– Potential for implementation in our ontology as

events are covered in ISO 15926• Would need to check compatibility to ‘Event’ in

YAMATO and suitability to ISO 15926

Authors: Giancarlo Guizzardi, Ricardo de Almeida Falbo, Renata S.S. Guizzardi and Joao Paulo A. AlmeidaOntology and Conceptual Modelling Research Group (NEMO), Fed. Uni. of Espírito Santo (UFES), BrazilGerd Wagner - Institute of Informatics, Brandenburg University of Technology, Germany

Paper 4: Is Traditional Conceptual Modelling Becoming Obsolete?

• Authors claim that with heterogeneous distributed information systems, analysis of requirements is very difficult and is likely to guarantee certain users will not be represented in the formal model

• Representation by abstraction pre-supposes consensus among stakeholders but is limited in the above case

• Authors lists several approaches to resolve issue:– Reduce the extent and depth of specification (i.e. barely good enough

models)– Domain ontologies – although authors write this off by stating they may

neglect all valid views and thereby inhibit domain understanding (self-author citation)

– Allow users to dynamically modify model but points out that issues arise concerning cooperative schema evolution, etc

Authors: Roman Lukyanenko and Jeffrey Parsons - Faculty of Business Administration, Memorial University of Newfoundland

• Author proposes ‘instance-based’ data models– Users can provide information based on their own

conceptualisation of reality• Evaluation– Authors state multiple statistical-based tests– Focus on ‘citizen-science’– Users can simply add new attributes to instances• e.g. ‘Mallard Duck’ has-attribute ‘has webbed feet’

Authors: Roman Lukyanenko and Jeffrey Parsons - Faculty of Business Administration, Memorial University of Newfoundland