Ontologies and Software Technologies - the MOST project

http://telecoms.comarch.com Comarch 2009 Marrying Ontologies and Software Technologies Comarch and the MOST project Visit: http://telecoms.comarch.com

“ I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.” [ Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide We b]

Web 3.0 or semantic web – definitions

Semantic Web - next generation web where machines can read web pages and extract useful information using cognitive decision-making ability, emulating human beings

HTML is still incapable of defining relationships among data - it provides merely for the presentation of information

I n order for web documents to be processed by a machine, a layer of semantic information needs to be added over the existing web content

Web Ontology Language (OWL) - a language to classify web content using a standard hierarchical categorization scheme

Resource Description Framework (RDF) - a data modeling framework that can be considered as a knowledge representation format

SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) - an RDF query language that facilitates extracting information from the web where content is represented using RDF ; t ogether, these technologies provide the means to annotate web content with meta-data and then help extract the required information by identifying the nature of the content.

Model-driven software development

M DSD - M odel-driven software development ( or Model-Driven Architecture – MDA) - an emerging technology that promises to introduce significant efficiencies and rigor to software development

I ncreased complexity of products + shorte r development cycles + higher expectations of quality = challenges at all stages of the software lifecycle

Response - software-engineering methodologies (mostly promoting usage of models) used to capture information concerning requirements, architecture, design, implementation and testing

Example: conceptualization of business entities that exist in the system domain in class diagrams available in Unified Modeling Language (UML)

MDSD – a promising approach

MDSD provides means for separating the business and implementation aspects of software at different abstraction levels – key for efficient development of complex software systems for a heterogeneous customer community

models are artifacts that lead to the running system - MDSD promotes frequent usage of automatic transformations that may generate platform-specific models and code from platform or computation-independent models: models are no longer just blueprints

In the context of Operation Support Systems (OSS) , MDSD is in line with the efforts of such bodies as the TMForum

Both TMF/NGOSS and OMG/MDA are aimed at providing benefits to the business leaders and development communities through technology - neutral architecture ( sustainable through technology changes )

Model-driven software development

MDSD still involves some challenges:

The specifications are fragmented on different abstraction levels

The MDSD processes can be difficult to configure and customize

Loss of oversight and understanding

Key questions to be answered:

Validity of models

Relationship between models and code

MOST project – Marrying Ontologies and Software Technologies

MOST - Marrying Ontology and Software Technology is an European Commission Information and Communication Technologies research project in Seventh Research Framework Programme. MOST started in February 2008 and has duration of 3 years; learn more on http://www.most-project.eu/

The main objective of the MOST project is to develop a seamless integration technology for ontologies into MDSD, resulting in ontology-driven software development (ODSD). This integration technology concerns all artifacts involved (ontology and modeling languages, models, tools), as well as development processes in order to guide the developers in their activities.

Comarch invelvement in the MOST project

Comarch, the coordinator of the MOST project, is to provide a case study for MOST technology. This involves :

evaluating the research results

providing industrial use cases that reflect real - life challenges of large scale software development

The case study is to cover the area of a large OSS development - Comarch has already formulated well - established development methodology for systems in the Comarch OSS Suite product line, including the usage of model - driven methods. The intent of the case study is to use these existing sources as a starting point and to adopt MOST technological advancement to increase productivity, time to market, and software quality.