A language for ontology-based metamodeling systems

Abstract

Nowadays, metamodeling techniques and ontologies play a central role in many computer science problems such as data exchange, integration of heterogeneous data and models or software reuse. Yet, if many metamodeling repositories and ontology repositories have been proposed, few attempts have been made to combine their advantages into a single repository with a dedicated language. In this paper, we present the capabilities of the OntoQL language for managing the various levels of information stored in a metamodeling systems where (1) both data, models and metamodels are available and (2) semantic descriptions are provided using ontologies. Some of the main characteristics of OntoQL are: management of the metamodel level using the same operators as the ones applied to data and to model levels, semantic queries through ontologies and SQL compatibility. We report several applications where this language has been extensively and successfully used. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.