Semantic Interoperability Integrating andAugmenting LegacyApplications withOWL Ontologies

Thispaperdescribes anapproach tosoftware interoperability basedon knowledgerepresentation technologies developed insupport oftheemerging Semantic Web.Inparticular, weareinterested intheinteroperation of anarbitrary set(twoormore)of"legacy" applications that operate inacommondomain, butthat werenotoriginally designed tosupport eachother ortoshare information. To dothis, wedevelop ameanstocreate ageneral meta-model ofthecommondomain ofdiscourse that contains, organizes andcorrelates theessential information thateachofthe applications needstofunction aswellasanyadditional information particular tothecomposed system. Thismodel becomesthebasisof communications betweenthe cooperating systems. Eachlegacy application isableto obtain inputdatafromthemodelandexport output information toaugment orupdate themodelinaformthat allows cooperating systems tooperate ontheupdated information. 12 We represent themeta-model inRDF/XMLwhich, we believe, provides several important advantages. RDF isa knowledge representation language that allows information tobedescribed asasetoffactual sentences. Whenthese sentences areconstrained byandconsistent withanOWL ontology, thisenables theuseofan existing, robust collection ofautomatic reasoners andother logical tools to classify, evaluate, query, apply rules andotherwise operate on themodelitself, independently ofthecooperating applications. We describe a"layered" setofOWL ontologies that serve asdomainmodelsfora numberoflegacy operations analysis simulations, aeronautical engineering design tools andsoftware prototypes thatareusedtosupport the integrated design anddevelopment ofaeronautical systems. We describe an approach tothedevelopment ofthe ontologies that references, andimports concepts fromwell knownfoundational ontologies, including DOLCE,GML andPSL. We thendescribe anexample that illustrates amethodology forcreating themeta-model asan"operational scenario"