Towards Ontology Driven Software Design
Paolo Ciancarini and Valentina Presutti
Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Informazione, University of Bologna
{ciancarini,presutti}@cs.unibo.it
Abstract. The World Wide Web represents a new space through which
any kind of organization can offer services and data. The huge diffusion
of this Internet service has led to develop a new kind of software systems,
called Web applications.
With the new concept of the Semantic Web the development of web
applications should evolve including, in their implementation, the use
of knowledge representation technologies in order to obtain all benefits
offered by the semantics annotation of documents and data.
We are studying the use of UML as a language for modeling organization
ontologies as a foundation for designing Web applications which support
organizations.
1 Introduction
During the last years the number of organizations which have “faced” themselves
on the World Wide Web with their portals has incredibly increased and this
trend probably will continue in the future. Organizations more and more rely
upon these portals for offering services to their members or to other people. The
large amount of information and services that these portals make available is
accessible through the specification of URI addresses, the use of search engines,
or following links from related arguments.
In order to support this new usage of Web technologies, the concept of a
Semantic Web has been introduced by Tim Berners-Lee. The goal of the Seman-
tic Web initiative is to give to all information available on the Web a machine
processable form, so that it can be used for several purposes, including more
interesting results when searching some specific information, better data inte-
gration from different sources, and the automation of organizational tasks across
organizations.
The World Wide Web represents a new space through which any kind of
organization can offer services and data. The huge diffusion of this Internet ser-
vice has led to develop a new kind of software systems, called Web applications.
Usually these are collections of web pages and services, connected through hy-
pertextual links, and supporting a given domain. A Web application describes
an organization structure, and provides a set of functionalities to its users which
are members and have specific roles in the organization.
With the new concept of the Semantic Web the development of web appli-
cations should evolve including, in their implementation, the use of knowledge
M. Wirsing et al. (Eds.): RISSEF 2002, LNCS 2941, pp. 122–136, 2004.
c
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004

Towards Ontology Driven Software Design 123
representation technologies in order to obtain all benefits offered by the seman-
tics annotation of documents and data. In fact, a Semantic Web application is
intended to be a Web application, where all pages are annotated with semantics
information, useful for describing machine processable organizational informa-
tion.
In order to give a machine processable form to organizational information, it
is necessary to define domain ontologies, which are shared vocabularies suitable
to provide say a Web page with a semantic description of its content. A do-
main ontology maintains meta-information about information, thus it maintains
information through the instantiation of the concepts. In order to define such
ontologies, a set of standard technologies has to be identified. The inclusion of a
standard semantics representation in a Web application enables the automation
of tasks through knowledge sharing.
For the purposes of this paper a Semantic Web application is intended to
be a Web portal that describes an organization structure, provides a set of
functionalities to its users, and manages and shares knowledge on organizational
information.
We investigate the design of a Semantic Web application from scratch, fo-
cusing on
– how the definition of the domain ontology affects design activities;
– the ontology lifecycle management, and its correspondence with system evo-
lution;
– knowledge sharing among Web applications and automation of tasks;
– knowledge reuse in terms of ontology evolution.
The first issue concerns the technologies used to express a system specification
design. The challenge here is to use the same paradigm to represent both the
system design and the domain ontology.
In particular, we focus on the object oriented paradigm and the set of stan-
dard technologies it is associated to.
More specifically, in some recent papers Cranefield [7, 8] has shown that UML
class and object diagrams can have a direct correspondence to ontology concepts.
We are exploiting this work in order to improve the design process of web ap-
plications.
Let us sketch the general method. When drawing a UML class diagram for
a Web application we are defining de facto the elements that characterize that
domain ontology. For instance, when we design the portal of a University, we
have to represent concepts like professor, student, faculty, etc. Then, via the
XML Diagram Interchange (XMI, the standard DTD for UML) [6] we can ob-
tain a translation from a UML class diagram to a corresponding RDF schema.
The Resource Description Framework (RDF) [2] is the technology that the World
Wide Web Consortium proposes to describe the data contained in the Web pages
and services, thus actually implementing a Semantic Web. The RDF is a model
for metadata and provides interoperability between applications exchanging ma-
chine understandable information on the Web.