Applying the UFO ontology to design an agent-oriented engineering language

Abstract

The problem of designing suitable conceptual modeling languages for system engineering is far from being solved. In the past years, some works have proposed the use of foundational ontologies as analysis tools to enable semantic coherence when (re)designing such languages. In this paper, we exemplify this approach by applying a foundational ontology named UFO in the design of an agent-oriented modeling language for the ARKnowD methodology. Instead of proposing new concepts and constructs, ARKnowD relies on existing work, combining two different approaches, namely Tropos and AORML. Each work is applied in a different development activity, according to their natural propensity: Tropos in Requirements Analysis and AORML in System Design. Besides the ontological approach, we propose some mapping rules between the notations, inspired in the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) metamodel transformation method. This approach helps to guarantee a smooth transition from one activity to the other. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.