Lifting metamodels to ontologies: a step to the semantic integration of modeling languages

  • Authors:

  • Gerti Kappel;Elisabeth Kapsammer;Horst Kargl;Gerhard Kramler;Thomas Reiter;Werner Retschitzegger;Wieland Schwinger;Manuel Wimmer

  • Affiliations:

  • Business Informatics Group, Vienna University of Technology;Information Systems Group, Johannes Kepler University Linz;Business Informatics Group, Vienna University of Technology;Business Informatics Group, Vienna University of Technology;Information Systems Group, Johannes Kepler University Linz;Information Systems Group, Johannes Kepler University Linz;Dept. of Telecooperation, Johannes Kepler University Linz;Business Informatics Group, Vienna University of Technology

  • Venue:
  • MoDELS'06 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

The use of different modeling languages in software development makes their integration a must. Most existing integration approaches are metamodel-based with these metamodels representing both an abstract syntax of the corresponding modeling language and also a data structure for storing models. This implementation specific focus, however, does not make explicit certain language concepts, which can complicate integration tasks. Hence, we propose a process which semi-automatically lifts metamodels into ontologies by making implicit concepts in the metamodel explicit in the ontology. Thus, a shift of focus from the implementation of a certain modeling language towards the explicit reification of the concepts covered by this language is made. This allows matching on a solely conceptual level, which helps to achieve better results in terms of mappings that can in turn be a basis for deriving implementation specific transformation code.