Bi-directional Transformation between Normalized Systems Elements and Domain Ontologies in OWL

Abstract

Knowledge representation in OWL ontologies gained a lot of popularity with the development of Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Semantic Web, and Linked Open Data. OWL ontologies are very versatile, and there are many tools for analysis, design, documentation, and mapping. They can capture concepts and categories, their properties and relations. Normalized Systems (NS) provide a way of code generation from a model of so-called NS Elements resulting in an information system with proven evolvability. The model used in NS contains domain-specific knowledge that can be represented in an OWL ontology. This work clarifies the potential advantages of having OWL representation of the NS model, discusses the design of a bi-directional transformation between NS models and domain ontologies in OWL, and describes its implementation. It shows how the resulting ontology enables further work on the analytical level and leverages the system design. Moreover, due to the fact that NS metamodel is metacircular, the transformation can generate ontology of NS metamodel itself. It is expected that the results of this work will help with the design of larger real-world applications as well as the metamodel and that the transformation tool will be further extended with additional features which we proposed.