Last week I introduced GSA, OsEra and our work on “Semantic
Core” as a mid to upper level ontology for architecture. Thus far
we have primarily “farmed”, integrated and generalized concepts out
of existing architectural languages (E.G. UML, BPMN, EDOC) and frameworks (E.G.
FEARMO, ISO 11179, DRM). Most of these source languages and frameworks
are not defined in terms of Ontologies and thus we are defining and refactoring
a common framework. However, we do not want to make another “concept
island” and thus would like to have these concepts grounded in at least
one of the well worked out upper Ontologies. This note is a request for
collaborators to do so. We need to select a base ontology and work to
align the concepts and then make the explicit relationships.
We need to select the base upper ontology based on;
- Ability to use it within our
open source project
- Maturity and stability
- Support and available expertise
- Compatibility with industry
directions
- Expressiveness
Expressiveness in an architectural sense means that most of
the concepts of modern architecture can be defined. We have a strong
focus on defining interoperability between systems (both human and technical systems),
process, interactions, roles and collaborations. We express business
rules, vocabularies, goals, requirements and process. Process in
particular is very important and this, of course defines behavior and change
over time. As is clear from some of our threads, context is crucial in
understanding these architectures. We understand how challenging some of
these concepts are for Ontologies but feel it is our job to capture the domain
semantics, more so than guaranteeing we can reason across them completely.
A primary purpose of these architectures will be to support
the full life-cycle of business and systems specification as well as to support
the model driven architecture pattern of provisioning from high-level
architectures to technology specifications and implementations supporting the
business architecture. We see a lot of potential for using ontology tools
and techniques to support the architectural process, to provide more precise
architectures and to get more value out of architecture. Unlike some of
the ontology visions we are more focused on the MDA “provisioning pattern”
to support enterprise scale information systems and integration at runtime than
extensive use of Ontologies as part of a runtime infrastructure (but that is
another thread!).
While we find the work to merge upper Ontologies interesting,
our focus is to use such an ontology for this purpose.
Anyone interested in participating should contact me
directly.
Regards,
Cory Casanave
Data Access Technologies, GSA-OsEra