Design Diagrams as Ontological Sources: Ontology Extraction and Utilization for Software Asset Reuse

Introduction

A Scientific American article describes evolution of Web that consisted largely of documents for humans to read and that included data and information for computers to manipulate. In order, to help the people and machines to communicate concisely, this huge repository of information (Web) have to be re-engineered to define shared and common domain theories that are machine processable. This is the precise aim of Semantic Web to build metadata – rich Web where presently human-readable content will have machine-understandable semantics. Semantic Web achieves the increased demand of shared semantic and a web of data and information derived from it through the adaptation of common conceptualizations referred to as Ontologies. Ontologies are fundamental building blocks of Semantic Web and therefore cheap and fast construction of domain-specific ontologies is crucial for the success and the proliferation of the Semantic Web. We explore how a semantic web may impact software engineering where common conceptualizations (e.g., software, work products, experience) from previous projects need to be reused in new projects.

The chapter will contribute in the following ways: (a) It will introduce an ontology learning technique from design diagrams (specifically UML) which is in line with the research direction of building ontologies from different sources to enable a rich semantic web; (b) It will show a concrete semantic web application how the semantic web technology of ontology can promote software reuse; (c) It will put recent research on transformations from UML to OWL and vice-versa in perspective; and (d) it will motivate more research effort in semi-automatically building integrated information models.