Ontologies and Conceptual Models in Industrial Enterprises and Software Development Processes

VEGETTI, MARCELA; GONNET, SILVIO; LEONE, HORACIO; HENNING, GABRIELA

Gramado

Workshop; Encuentro Iberoamericano de Ontologías; 2011

Universidad Federal de Rio Grando Do Sul

This paper describes the research lines of our group, which is interested in developing conceptual models and domain ontologies in the field of industrial enterprises and software development processes. We completely agree with the view of domain ontologies as explicit and formal models of specific knowledge fields, which satisfy the requirement of reflecting the consensus of a community. The reasons why the group has been involved in the development of conceptual models and domain ontologies in the past 20 years are the following: (i) They play an essential role in describing and understanding complex fields; (ii) As a shared notation and a conceptual foundation, they facilitate the communication, discussion, exchange of case studies, etc., among the members of a community; (iii) Since knowledge is explicitly and formally expressed, conceptual models and ontologies support inference processes and, therefore, the development of intelligent systems; (iv) By providing a declarative, machine readable representation, ontologies can enable unambiguous communication between software agents that would otherwise be difficult or impossible. In this way, ontologies play a central role in solving nowadays problems associated with islands of automation by providing a semantic integration foundation to the enterprise applications integration field. Section 2.1. presents the more established research lines associated with ontologies and conceptual models for industrial enterprises. They are related to the development of conceptual and reference models, domain ontologies, architectures and collaborative tools to reach integration within organizations, as well as among different industrial enterprises. Some of these models and ontologies support the underlying reasoning mechanisms of some intelligent systems in the areas of industrial planning and scheduling. In addition, they include the development of tools that support the modeling and design of collaborative business processes. On the other hand, Section 2.2 describes more recent research lines associated with ontologies and conceptual models that participate in software development processes.