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Friday, December 09, 2005

 

 The BCNGroup Beadgames

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(new thread on Emergency Medical Ontology Project planning  à [home] )

 

 

Note to ONTAG WG from Cory Casanave

 

Last week I introduced GSA, OsEra and our work on “Semantic Core” as a mid to upper level ontology for architecture.  

Thus far we have primarily “farmed”, integrated and generalized concepts out of existing architectural languages (E.G. UML, BPMN, EDOC) and frameworks (E.G. FEARMO, ISO 11179, DRM).  

Most of these source languages and frameworks are not defined in terms of Ontologies and thus we are defining and refactoring a common framework.  However, we do not want to make another “concept island” and thus would like to have these concepts grounded in at least one of the well worked out upper Ontologies.  This note is a request for collaborators to do so.  We need to select a base ontology and work to align the concepts and then make the explicit relationships.

We need to select the base upper ontology based on;

Expressiveness in an architectural sense means that most of the concepts of modern architecture can be defined.  We have a strong focus on defining interoperability between systems (both human and technical systems), process, interactions, roles and collaborations.  We express business rules, vocabularies, goals, requirements and process. 

Process in particular is very important and this, of course defines behavior and change over time.  As is clear from some of our threads, context is crucial in understanding these architectures.  We understand how challenging some of these concepts are for Ontologies but feel it is our job to capture the domain semantics, more so than guaranteeing we can reason across them completely.

A primary purpose of these architectures will be to support the full life-cycle of business and systems specification as well as to support the model driven architecture pattern of provisioning from high-level architectures to technology specifications and implementations supporting the business architecture.  We see a lot of potential for using ontology tools and techniques to support the architectural process, to provide more precise architectures and to get more value out of architecture.  Unlike some of the ontology visions we are more focused on the MDA “provisioning pattern” to support enterprise scale information systems and integration at runtime than extensive use of Ontologies as part of a runtime infrastructure (but that is another thread!).

While we find the work to merge upper Ontologies interesting, our focus is to use such an ontology for this purpose.

Anyone interested in participating should contact me directly.

Regards,

Cory Casanave

Data Access Technologies, GSA-OsEra