Deploying ontologies in software design

• Main Author: Kalfoglou, I.
• Published: University of Edinburgh 2000
• Subjects: 006.3
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.653180

1). After presenting an in depth analysis of the field of ontologies and software testing as conceived and implemented by the software engineering and artificial intelligence communities (chapter 2), we discuss an approach which enabled us to deploy ontologies in the early phases of software development (i.e.: specifications) in order to detect conceptual errors (chapter 3). It is based on the provision of ontological axioms which are used to verify conformance of specification constructs to the underpinning ontology. To facilitate the integration of ontology with applications that adopt it we developed an architecture and built tools to implement the this form of conceptual errors check (chapter 4). We apply and evaluate the architecture on a variety of contexts to identify potential uses (chapter 5). An implication of this method for deploying ontologies to reason about the correctness of applications is to raise our trust in given ontologies. However, when these are erroneous we might fail to reveal pernicious discrepancies. To cope with this problem we extended the architecture in a multi-layer form (chapter 4) which gives us the ability to check for correctness the ontologies themselves. We apply this multi-layer architecture to capture errors founded in a complex ontologies lattice (chapter 6). We further elaborate on the weaknesses in ontology evaluation methods and employed a technique stemming form software engineering, that of experience management, to facilitate ontology testing and deployment. (chapter 7). The work presented in this thesis aims to improve ontology exercise and identify areas to which ontologies could be of benefits other than the advocated ones of knowledge sharing and reuse (chapter 8).