Affiliations: Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Information System Research Laboratory, Information System Department, Saulėtekio al. 11, LT-10223, Vilnius, Lithuania. E-mail: diana@isl.vgtu.lt, olegas@isl.vgtu.lt
Abstract: Nowadays, ontologies play a central role in many computer science problems such as data modelling, data exchange, integration of heterogeneous data and models or software reuse. Yet, if many methods of ontology based conceptual data modelling have been proposed, only few attempts have been made to ontology axioms based modelling of business rules, which make an integral part of each conceptual data model. In this paper, we present the approach how ontology axioms can be used for business rules implementation. Our proposal we apply for the transformation of PAL (Protege Axiom Language) constraints (ontology axioms), which is based on KIF (Knowledge Interchange Format) and is part of KIF ontology, into OCL (Object Constraint Language) constraints, which are part of a UML class diagram. Z language is used to formalise the proposal and describe the transformation. The Axiom2OCL plug-in is created for automation of the transformation and a case study is carried out.
Keywords: ontology axiom, conceptual data model, OCL constraint, UML class diagram, transformation, Z language
Journal: Informatica, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 369-390, 2012
