Derivation of Event-B Models from OWL Ontologies

Abstract

Abstract. The derivation of formal specifications from large and complex requirements is a key challenge in systems engineering. In this paper we present an approach that aims to address this challenge by building formal models from OWL ontologies. An ontology is used in the field of knowledge representation to capture a clear view of the domain and to produce a concise and unambiguous set of domain requirements. We harness the power of ontologies to handle inconsistency of domain requirements and produce clear, concise and unambiguous set of domain requirements for Event-B modelling. The proposed approach works by generating Attempto Controlled English (ACE) from the OWL ontology and then maps the ACE requirements to develop Event-B models. ACE is a subset of English that can be unambiguously translated into first-order logic. There is an injective mapping between OWL ontology and a subset of ACE. ACE is a suitable interlingua for producing the mapping between OWL and Event-B models for many reasons. Firstly, ACE is easy to learn and understand, it hides the math of OWL and would be natural to use by everybody. Secondly ACE has a parser that converts ACE texts into Discourse Representation Structures (DRS). Finally, ACE can be extended to target a richer syntactic subset of Event-B which ultimately would facilitate the translation of ACE requirements to Event-B.

Graphical Transformation of OWL Ontologies to Event-B Formal Models

“…Although our approach uses UML-B, we use it in the proposed approach to generate Event-B models from OWL ontologies, whereas in [8], UML-B was used to map data-oriented requirements to an Event-B model. Another work by [9,10] aimed to build Event-B models from OWL ontologies. It used an OWL-verbalizer to generate controlled English requirements called Attempto Controlled English (ACE) from OWL ontologies, and these could then be used to construct Event-B models.…”

“…The Event-B model that shows examples of reflexive/irreflexive properties is shown in Fig. 17 Axiomatic definitions that appear in the tooltips of OntoGraf can be translated into Event-B models manually or by using the approach mentioned in [9].…”