Breaking into pieces: An ontological approach to conceptual model complexity management

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a growth in the use of reference conceptual models, in general, and domain ontologies, in particular, to capture information about complex and critical domains. These models play a fundamental role in different types of critical semantic interoperability tasks. Therefore, it is essential that domain experts are able to understand and reason using the models' content. In other words, it is important that conceptual models are cognitively tractable. However, it is unavoidable that when the information of the represented domain grows, so does the size and complexity of the artifacts and models that represent them. For this reason, more sophisticated techniques for complexity management in ontology-driven conceptual models, need to be developed. Some approaches are based on the notion of model modularization. In this paper, we follow the work on model modularization to present an approach for view extraction for the ontology-driven conceptual modeling language OntoUML. We provide a formal definition for ontological views over OntoUML conceptual models that completely leverages on the ontologically well-grounded real-world semantics of that language. Moreover, we present a plug-in tool, particularly developed for an OntoUML model-based editor that implements this formal view structure in terms of queries defined over the OntoUML metamodel embedded in that tool.