Case studies for marrying ontology and software technologies

Abstract

In this chapter, we conclude Part I with several industrial case studies for motivating consistency-preserving software development. Many of these case studies will be revisited in later chapters, in particular Chaps. 9 and 10. Many of the solutions are based on the scalable reasoning technologies to be introduced in Chap. 5. The rest of this chapter is organised as follows. Section. 4.1 shows which problems companies meet when they want to specify correct and consistent domain models of telecommunication device configurations. Another case study (Sect. 4.2) treats consistency preservation for behavioural models (process models). In business process refinement, the more concrete, refined processes have to conform to the abstract business processes the consultant specified. Showing this form of consistency of refinement is not easy for the process architect, as it turns out. Section 4.3 presents the problem of consistency of product lines, their correct modelling of their variant spaces and the consistent selection of their variants.