Peter Rosina

Lexicalized ontology for a business rules management platform: an automotive use case

This paper describes a platform that helps industrial domain experts to preserve the connection between textual sources and formalized business rules by using lexicalized ontologies both for links and for storage of the conceptual knowledge. Business Rules Management Systems (BRMSs) are used to update and query business rules of an automotive use case. They rely strongly on domain ontologies, which model the business knowledge and provide a conceptual vocabulary for the formalization of the rules that are expressed in written policies. We show that lexicalized ontologies are a key component of such BRMSs and how such knowledge can be encoded. Our proposed solution supports domain experts in the automotive industry in understanding and maintaining their business rules by presenting the relevant source documents that were used to create the ontological concepts. The use case is based on a car development scenario that models the connection between car testing scenarios, e.g., safety tests, and the methods and tools used to analyze and prepare these tests. The intended solution has been developed in the ONTORULE project and is still work in progress.

The ONTORULE project: Where ontology meets business rules

The objective of ONTORULE is to enable users, from business executives over business analysts to IT developers, to interact in their own way with the part of a business application that is relevant to them. This extended abstract describes the approach the ONTORULE project proposes to business rule application development, and it introduces the architecture and the semantic technologies that we develop for that purpose and that are validated and demonstrated in two pilot applications.

Enterprise Methods Management Using Semantic Web Technologies

Due to today’s product complexity and variety and a shortening of development cycles, for instance, in the automotive domain, a conventional knowledge representation and management of the various design methods is not reasonable anymore. By acquiring the relevant domain and business knowledge from IT applications, documents and experts and creating ontologies, business rules and queries thereof, domain experts can manage this knowledge independently and thus react faster to the ever-changing development process. Using Semantic Web technologies, we created a methods ontology that enables domain experts to analyze and compare method meta knowledge, e.g., about physical and virtual CAx methods. Furthermore, this particular domain and business knowledge features interdependencies with the remaining enterprise knowledge, including business processes, organizational aspects and the IT architecture. Therefore, we show concepts for the integration of this method meta knowledge into an enterprise architecture.

Change and Version Management in Variability Models for Modular Ontologies

Modular ontology management tries to overcome the disadvantages of large ontologies regarding reuse and performance. A possibility for the formalization of the various combinations are variability models, which originate from the software product line domain. Similar to that domain, knowledge models can then be individualized for a specific application through selection and exclusion of modules. However, the ontology repository as well as the requirements of the domain are not stable over time. A process is needed, that enables knowledge engineers and domain experts to adapt the principles of version and change management to the domain of modular ontology management. In this paper, we define the existing change scenarios and provide support for keeping the repository, the variability model and also the configurations consistent using Semantic Web technologies. The approach is presented with a use case from the enterprise architecture domain as running example.

Semantic Technologies for the Integration of Methods into an Enterprise Architecture

In order to face today’s challenges in product development, like product complexity, variability and a shortening of development cycles, for instance, in the automotive domain, the Product Development Process (PDP) tends to entail more and more virtual tasks instead of physical, conventional ones, for example, implemented by Computer Aided x (CAx) technologies. The introduced novel approach promotes this transformation by supporting the appropriate stakeholders in formalizing, analyzing, assessing, comparing and hence selecting the most suitable methods, like physical and virtual design methods or CAx methods, that are utilized to execute these tasks.

Management of Variability in Modular Ontology Development

The field of variability management deals with the formalization of mandatory, alternative and optional domain concepts in product line engineering. Ontologies in turn, describe domain knowledge in form of predicates, subjects and constraints in various forms. Based on existing ontology mapping approaches, we developed a method to organize a set of modular ontologies using the concepts of variability management (MOVO). This ontology driven variability model can be stepwise adapted to the needs of a business driven one, resulting in a variability model that fits the needs of business and makes modular ontologies reusable in a simple manner. In order to avoid a technological break and to benefit from the opportunities that ontologies offer, the resulting variability model is expressed in an ontology itself. The approach is evaluated by one case study with enterprise architecture ontologies.