Grounding Software Domain Ontologies in the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO): The case of the ODE Software Process Ontology Giancarlo Guizzardi Renata S.S. Guizzardi Ontological Modeling Research Group (NEMO),Computer Science Department, UFES, Vitoria/ES, Brazil i* Internal Workshop Barcelona, Spain July, 2010

Formal Ontology (Husserl) An interdisciplinary area comprising results from Philosophical Ontology, Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Philosophical Logic to develop a number of domain-independent sub-theories (e.g., theory of parts and wholes, theory of properties and relations, classification and taxonomic structures, identity, existential dependence, etc.), which are able to characterize aspects of real-world entities irrespective of their particular nature. End Result: Foundational Ontologies

Foundational and Material Ontologies Material Ontologies: Set of categories whose existence is to be admitted in specific domain (e.g. Molecular Biology) A Foundational Ontology thus supply a set of (meta-) categories which can be used in the development of material ontologies

What is an Ontology? Information Systems/Data Modeling view: the same idea as in Philosophy. For years, (Foundational) Ontologies have been used to evaluate and re-design conceptual modeling grammars. Artificial Intelligence: a representation of a singular domain (e.g., molecular biology, finance, logistics,ceramic materials) expressed in knowledge representation (e.g.,RDF, OWL, F- Logic) or conceptual modeling lanuguage (e.g., UML, EER).

Ontoogies in Software Engineering ODE (mid-90’s): ontologies as representations of software engineering domains such as Software Process, Software Quality, Software Artifacts,etc... Ontologies have been used in that context as precise domain models (in the domain engineering sense) which have been used to develop OO frameworks that are integrated in a semantic SEE.

Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) UFO-A (STRUCTURAL ASPECTS) (Objects, their types, their parts/wholes, the roles they play, their intrinsic and relational properties Property value spaces…) UFO-B (DYNAMIC ASPECTS) (Events and their parts, Relations between events, Object participation in events, Temporal properties of entities, Time…) UFO-C (SOCIAL ASPECTS) (Agents, Intentional States, Goals, Actions, Norms, Social Commitments/Claims, Social Dependency Relations…)

UFO-A: Structural Aspects

Quality Structures

Qualia and Quality Dimensions

Externally Dependent Moments

Situation

UFO-B: Dynamic Aspects

Allen’s Relations

UFO-C: Social Aspects

UFO-C: Actions, Plans and Scheduled Actions

Action(Occurences), Action Universals and Scheduled Actions As a result of our analysis we can make clear that scheduled actions are neither action occurences nor action universals. In fact, they are not actions at all! Scheduled actions are commitments to instantiate specific action universals at specific time intervals, i.e., closed appointments!

Analyzing and Re-Designing a Software Process Ontology

The ODE Software Process Ontology The basis for the development of a process infrastructure for ODE, a Process-Centered Software Engineering Environment. It has been shown to be expressive enough to be used as a common ground for mapping the software process fragments of standards such as ISO/IEC ISO 9001:2000-ISO/IEC 15504, CMMI, RUP and SPEM.

Final Considerations We presented the latest developments in the UFO foundational ontology. We demonstrate how UFO can be used to evaluate, re-design and give real-world semantics to an ontology in the software engineering domain (the ODE Software Process Ontology).

Acknowledgements This research is funded by the Brazilian Research Funding Agencies FAPES (grant number /09) and CNPq (grants number /2009-6)

Final Considerations This process has been applied in the analysis and re-design of other reference models (e.g., ITIL). The intention is to apply to the other Software Engineering Ontologies in the ODE Environment in order to build a body of explicitly defined SE ontological base comprising a set of well-grounded domain theories.