Grounding Software Domain Ontologies in the Unified

Foundational Ontology (UFO): The case of the ODE Software

Process Ontology

Giancarlo GuizzardiRenata S.S. Guizzardi

Ontological Modeling Research Group (NEMO),Computer Science Department,

UFES, Vitoria/ES, Brazil

i* Internal WorkshopBarcelona, Spain

July, 2010

Formal Ontology (Husserl)

An interdisciplinary area comprising results from Philosophical Ontology, Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Philosophical Logic to develop a number of domain-independent sub-theories (e.g., theory of parts and wholes, theory of properties and relations, classification and taxonomic structures, identity, existential dependence, etc.), which are able to characterize aspects of real-world entities irrespective of their particular nature.

End Result: Foundational Ontologies

Foundational and Material Ontologies

• Material Ontologies: Set of categories whose existence is to be admitted in specific domain (e.g. Molecular Biology)

• A Foundational Ontology thus supply a set of (meta-) categories which can be used in the development of material ontologies

What is an Ontology?

• Information Systems/Data Modeling view: the same idea as in Philosophy. For years, (Foundational) Ontologies have been used to evaluate and re-design conceptual modeling grammars.

• Artificial Intelligence: a representation of a singular domain (e.g., molecular biology, finance, logistics,ceramic materials) expressed in knowledge representation (e.g.,RDF, OWL, F-Logic) or conceptual modeling lanuguage (e.g., UML, EER).

Ontoogies in Software Engineering

• ODE (mid-90’s): ontologies as representations of software engineering domains such as Software Process, Software Quality, Software Artifacts,etc...

• Ontologies have been used in that context as precise domain models (in the domain engineering sense) which have been used to develop OO frameworks that are integrated in a semantic SEE.

Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO)

UFO-A (STRUCTURAL ASPECTS)(Objects, their types, their parts/wholes,

the roles they play, their intrinsic and relational properties

Property value spaces…)

UFO-B (DYNAMIC ASPECTS)(Events and their parts,

Relations between events,Object participation in events,

Temporal properties of entities, Time…)

UFO-C (SOCIAL ASPECTS)(Agents, Intentional States, Goals, Actions,

Norms, Social Commitments/Claims, Social Dependency Relations…)

UFO-A: Structural Aspects

Quality Structures

Qualia and Quality Dimensions

Externally Dependent Moments

j1

j2

j3

m1

m2

m3

JohnMary

Externally Dependent Moments

j1

j2

j3

m1

m2

m3

JohnMaryJohn-qua-husband

Mary-qua-wife

Externally Dependent Moments

j1

j2

j3

m1

m2

m3

JohnMary

Marriage1

Situation

JohnMary

Marriage2

UFPE

Employment1

Situation1

UFO-B: Dynamic Aspects

Allen’s Relationsb

a

a

a

a

a

a

a before b

a meets b

a overlaps b

a starts b

a during b

a finishes b

a a equals b

begin end

UFO-C: Social Aspects

UFO-C: Actions, Plans and Scheduled Actions

Action(Occurences), Action Universals and Scheduled Actions

• As a result of our analysis we can make clear that scheduled actions are neither action occurences nor action universals. In fact, they are not actions at all!

• Scheduled actions are commitments to instantiate specific action universals at specific time intervals, i.e., closed appointments!

Analyzing and Re-Designing a Software Process Ontology

The ODE Software Process Ontology

• The basis for the development of a process infrastructure for ODE, a Process-Centered Software Engineering Environment.

• It has been shown to be expressive enough to be used as a common ground for mapping the software process fragments of standards such as ISO/IEC 12207-ISO 9001:2000-ISO/IEC 15504, CMMI, RUP and SPEM.

Final Considerations

• We presented the latest developments in the UFO foundational ontology.

• We demonstrate how UFO can be used to evaluate, re-design and give real-world semantics to an ontology in the software engineering domain (the ODE Software Process Ontology).

Acknowledgements

This research is funded by the Brazilian ResearchFunding Agencies FAPES (grant number 45444080/09) and

CNPq (grants number 481906/2009-6)

Final Considerations

• This process has been applied in the analysis and re-design of other reference models (e.g., ITIL).

• The intention is to apply to the other Software Engineering Ontologies in the ODE Environment in order to build a body of explicitly defined SE ontological base comprising a set of well-grounded domain theories.