Object-Role Modeling Research Articles

Ontology-Based Knowledge Flow Model Design to Develop Global Virtual Team (GVT) Performance

Global virtual teams (GVTs) have grown in popularity as a result of increased globalization and advancements in communication technologies. GVTs are playing an increasingly important role. Little is known about its strategy, dynamics, or efficacy in global organizations. Many researchers have focused on virtual teams but have not supported semantic search techniques and the ability of GVT knowledge to be understood by people and computers. This study was therefore aimed at building an ontology-based knowledge flow model for improving GVT performance. The Mapping Master domain-specific language (Mapping Master DSL) technology was used to build the ontology. It enables the creation and linking of concepts and individuals to the ontology using Excel sheets. The conceptual framework was built using the object role modeling (ORM) language. The SPARQL query was used to test and evaluate the proposed ontology..

Building Quranic stories ontology using MappingMaster domain-specific language

<p>The Holy Quran, due to it is full of many inspiring stories and multiple lessons that need to understand it requires additional attention when it comes to searching issues and information retrieval. Many works were carried out in the Holy Quran field, but some of these dealt with a part of the Quran or covered it in general, and some of them did not support semantic research techniques and the possibility of understanding the Quranic knowledge by the people and computers. As for others, techniques of data analysis, processing, and ontology were adopted, which led to directed these to linguistic aspects more than semantic. Another weakness in the previous works, they have adopted the method manually entering ontology, which is costly and time-consuming. In this paper, we constructed the ontology of Quranic stories. This ontology depended in its construction on the MappingMaster domain-specific language (MappingMaster DSL)technology, through which concepts and individuals can be created and linked automatically to the ontology from Excel sheets. The conceptual structure was built using the object role modeling (ORM) modeling language. SPARQL query language used to test and evaluate the propsed ontology by asking many competency questions and as a result, the ontology answered all these questions well.</p>

Requirements document relations

Relations between requirements are part of nearly every requirements engineering approach. Yet, relations of views, such as requirements documents, are scarcely considered. This is remarkable as requirements documents and their structure are a key factor in requirements reuse, which is still challenging. Explicit formalized relations between documents can help to ensure consistency, improve completeness, and facilitate review activities in general. For example, this is relevant in space engineering, where many challenges related to complex document dependencies occur: 1. Several contractors contribute to a project. 2. Requirements from standards have to be applied in several projects. 3. Requirements from previous phases have to be reused. We exploit the concept of “layered traceability”, explicitly considering documents as views on sets of individual requirements and specific traceability relations on and between all of these representation layers. Different types of relations and their dependencies are investigated with a special focus on requirement reuse through standards and formalized in an Object-Role Modelling (ORM) conceptual model. Automated analyses of requirement graphs based on this model are able to reveal document inconsistencies. We show examples of such queries in Neo4J/Cypher for the EagleEye case study. This work aims to be a step toward a better support to handle highly complex requirement document dependencies in large projects with a special focus on requirements reuse and to enable automated quality checks on dependent documents to facilitate requirements reviews.

Product design lifecycle information model (PDLIM)

In response to rapidly changing market and customer needs, product design and development (PDD) is evolving into a human-centred and data-driven design paradigm. The design environment gets more open often involving crowdsourcing and the design process becomes more complex, considering product family design along product whole lifecycle development, and needing more data support. Therefore, it is critical to effectively capture, share, and manage design-related information in such a complex design environment. From this perspective, it is a prerequisite to have a proper product design lifecycle information model (PDLIM) to guide information gathering, sharing and management. To the best of our knowledge, currently, there lacks such a PDLIM to support effective PDD, though digital twin (DT) technology shows a great potential of supporting product lifecycle information collection and management. In this paper, the overall structure of the proposed PDLIM is firstly developed to frame in all main product lifecycle stages and the corresponding key phases for structurally capturing and storing necessary data along a product lifecycle. Secondly, key design information items against the main product lifecycle stages and their corresponding key phases are explored from literature reviews and case study analyses. Thirdly, the necessity of the identified information items in the PDLIM is qualitatively evaluated by two case studies. Finally, the PDLIM is further evaluated by applying formal object-role modelling (ORM) to demonstrate how design information items are used and interacted in exemplary design interaction scenarios, and to approve that it can be formally described and managed as an information model. The evaluation results show that the PDLIM is feasible to be adapted in a crowdsourcing-combined PDD process for supporting design management, reviewing, quality control, and next round product redesign and improvement.

ORM Diagram as an Intermediate Model for OWL Ontology Engineering: Protégé ORM Plugin Implementation

OWL2, a widely-used ontology-representation language, is poorly perceived by humans because OWL2 statements have a low level of abstraction. To solve this issue, various OWL2 ontology editors are used, which allow to group statements and represent them using some visual notation. ORM-diagram is a good candidate for an intermediate model for authoring and understanding of OWL2-ontology as Object-Role Modelling notation supports visually distinguishable constructs, has the high expressive capabilities, and implements the node-link paradigm and the attribute-free approach A Protégé plugin allowing to create an ORM2-diagram using the live error checking approach was implemented. The plugin allows us to form a valid object-oriented diagram model in computer memory using a widely known ontology authoring tool Protégé.

RETRACTED ARTICLE: An integrated approach towards automated software requirements elicitation from unstructured documents

Enormous amount of text documents that contains requirements expressed in form of unstructured text are obtained in big software development projects and they have to be transformed into structured documents. Collecting requirements from such huge volume of informal text is still a key mission to be achieved. The majority of the software requirements data that are available to software engineers are articulated in form of Natural Language text and there is no formal grammar or specified syntax are followed by the customer for writing requirements i.e. they are highly unstructured. Manual requirements elicitation from these unstructured documents takes lot of time, it is also subject to errors and it is tedious to perform. Any deficiency in the process of gathering the requirements will lead to undesirable consequences that affects the software development. Requirements that are confusing and not complete in any aspect can collapse the software development project itself. We focus on developing an integrated framework towards automated software requirements elicitation from unstructured documents. A formal grammar based technique is developed to tackle the complex sentence structure, regular expression grammar rules that analyzes the linguistic elements in unstructured text are developed and applied to extract the core concepts/entities and relations between entities, the building blocks of any information system development. Another important task that contributes for automation is to build a domain ontology consisting of concepts, their attributes and relation between concepts and axioms, it extends guidance in the semantic labelling of the extracted information constructs. Since it is expensive to have a domain expert to be present all through the stages of software requirements elicitation, domain ontology serves as a background knowledge source. The extracted requirements after semantic association are then presented to the user in form of Object Role Model diagrams to obtain their consent. The framework provides an overall accuracy of 91% in terms of semantic mapping of the extracted requirements.

Decomposition and Conceptualization to Support System Dynamics Behavior Modeling

With the increasing need for data-based decision making, social systems and the ecosystems; practitioners and decision makers need guidance in their decision making, as is offered by data-based models and a systematic generation of simulation tools. Overtly, relations between data and practice have been under-conceptualized. Data modelers and decision makers tend to lack a mutual understanding of each other’s knowledge systems which has led to huge knowledge gaps. Assimilation of modeling methods therefore is vital. Modeling methods use a specific way of thinking, rules and directions on how to model different aspects of systems. These rules and directions are what we refer to as constructs. Conceptualizing model relations and formulations requires significant domain knowledge and understanding of the constructs. In this article, we use the decomposition mechanism to better conceptualize and understand the System Dynamics (SD) model behavior, and show how using a natural language based domain modeling method (Object-Role Modeling, ORM) helps in dealing with complex SD models. Through applying the decomposition mechanism, we are able to better understand the underlying concepts of the stock and flow diagram and update behaviors of ORM objects. To achieve this, we use examples and an SD model derived from a case “Intrapartum process in Ugandan hospitals” to study the object behaviors. The main results of this article include: a theoretical founding of integrating ORM with SD; quantitative analysis at the level of ORM reasoning; and transformation rules from ORM into SD.

Automated Verbalization of ORM Models in Malay and Mandarin

Fact-oriented modeling approaches such as Object-Role Modeling (ORM) include a rich graphical notation for capturing business constraints, allowing modelers to visualize fine details of their data models. These data models should be validated with domain experts who best understand the business requirements, even if unfamiliar with the graphical notation. Hence, the data models are best validated by verbalizing the models in a controlled natural language, and by populating the relevant fact types with examples. Comparatively little support exists for verbalizing fact-based models in non-English languages, especially Asian languages. This paper describes the authors' work on verbalizing ORM models in Bahasa Melayu (Malay) and Mandarin. The authors specify some typical transformation patterns, discuss features of these languages requiring special treatment (e.g. noun classifiers, repositioning of modal operators, and different uses for terms equivalent to “who” and “that” in English), and describe their current implementation efforts.

Static and Dynamic Aspects of Application Domains: An Inductively Defined Modeling Technique That Allows Decomposition

Modeling is one of the most important parts of requirements engineering. Most modeling techniques focus primarily on their pragmatics and pay less attention to their syntax and semantics. Different modeling techniques describe different aspects, for example, Object-Role Modeling (ORM) describes underlying concepts and their relations while System Dynamics (SD) focuses on the dynamic behavior of relevant objects in the underlying application domain. In this paper we provide an inductive definition for a generic modeling technique. Not only do we describe the underlying data structure, we also show how states can be introduced for relevant concepts and how their life cycles can be modeled in terms of System Dynamics. We also show how decomposition can be applied to master complex application domains. As a result we get an integrated modeling technique covering both static and dynamic aspects of application domains. The inductive definition of this integrated modeling technique will facilitate the implementation of supporting tools for practitioners.

Formal Semantics of Dynamic Constraints and Derivation Rules in ORM

This paper provides formal semantics for an extension of the Object-Role Modeling approach to support declaration of dynamic rules. Dynamic rules differ from static rules by involving state transitions, rather than simply individual states. This paper restricts application of dynamic rules to single-step transactions, with a previous state (input to the transaction) and a new state (the result of that transaction). These dynamic rules specify an elementary transaction type by indicating which kinds of objects or facts (being added, deleted or updated) are involved. Dynamic rules may declare pre-conditions relevant to the transaction, and a post-condition stating the properties of the new state. In this paper the authors provide such dynamic rules with a formal semantics based on sorted, first-order predicate logic. The key idea underlying their solution is the formalization of dynamic constraints in terms of static constraints on the database transaction history.

Modeling of Linguistic Reference Schemes

When using natural language, people typically refer to individual things by using proper names or definite descriptions. Data modeling languages differ considerably in their support for such linguistic reference schemes. Understanding these differences is important for modeling reference schemes within such languages and for transforming models from one language to another. This article provides a comparative review of reference scheme modeling within the Unified Modeling Language (version 2.5), the Barker dialect of Entity Relationship modeling, Object-Role Modeling (version 2), relational database modeling, and the Web Ontology Language (version 2.0). The author identifies which kinds of reference schemes can be captured within these languages as well as those reference schemes that cannot be. The author's analysis covers simple reference schemes, compound reference schemes, disjunctive reference and context-dependent reference schemes.

Lightweight formalization and validation of ORM models

ORM (Object Role Modeling) is a rich and popular conceptual modeling method. ORM has been used for data modeling, ontology engineering, modeling business rules, XML-Schemes and data warehouses, requirements engineering and web forms. Automated reasoning like satisfiability testing allows developers to detect modeling mistakes in the early stages of development. In this paper we propose a lightweight formalization of the ORM meta-model in Alloy. Using this meta-model as a toolkit one can easily specify ORM models in Alloy and verify various properties on them using the Alloy Analyzer. In order to achieve scalability, we use the cardinality of concepts to model their population. This increases the scalability of the approach dramatically. To show an application of the meta-model we formalize some unsatisfiability patterns and check them on the Alloy representation of the ORM model.

Incorporating ontology-based semantics into conceptual modelling

With the increasing complexity of applications and user needs, recent research has shifted from a data-information level to a human semantic level interaction. Research has begun to address the increasing use and development of ontologies in various applications, strongly motivated by the semantic web initiative. However, existing conceptual models are not rich enough to incorporate ontologies in one single conceptual schema. To improve this situation, it is necessary to refine modelling formalisms and make them more expressive while ensuring they remain semantically sound. We argue that conceptual modelling methodologies would be semantically richer if they were able to express the semantics of a domain that arises in concrete application scenarios. This paper investigates the incorporation of ontologies into three popular conceptual modelling methodologies, presenting the Ontological Entity-Relationship (OntoER) model, Ontological Object Role Modelling (OntoORM) and the Ontological Unified Modelling Language (OntoUML) class diagram. An extended conceptual framework for modelling ontologies and a transformation algorithm for mapping ontological constructs to relational schemata are provided so that querying the database through the conceptualisation of the database can be managed.

A model-driven approach to semi-structured database design

Recently XML has become a standard for data representation and the preferred method of encoding structured data for exchange over the Internet. Moreover it is frequently used as a logical format to store structured and semi-structured data in databases. We propose a model-driven and configurable approach for modeling hierarchical XML data using object role modeling (ORM) as a flat conceptual model. First a non-hierarchical conceptual schema of the problem domain is built using ORM and then different hierarchical views of the conceptual schema or parts of it are specified by the designer using transformation rules. A hierarchical modeling notation called H-ORM is proposed to show these hierarchical views and model more complex semi-structured data constructs and constraints. We also propose an algorithm to map hierarchical H-ORM views to XML schema language.

ENHANCING THE SYSTEM DYNAMICS MODELING PROCESS WITH A DOMAIN MODELING METHOD

Defining complex system dynamics (SD) models in complex organizational settings is hard. This is so because the numbers of variables to consider are many and the question of causation is complicated to untangle. Second, SD models are ambiguous and hard to conceptualize. In this paper, we explore the use of a domain modeling method object-role modeling (ORM) in the process of developing SD models. We do so, because domain modeling methods help to identify relationships among entities within the scope of the problem domain and provide a structural view of the domain. The addition of a domain modeling method to the process of developing SD models is to improve SD model conceptualization, enable transformation and reuse of information plus underpin SD with a domain modeling method that allows creation of database. To realize this, we come up with a procedure in our overall research which we refer to as grounded system dynamics (GSD) a combination of ORM and SD. To reason about the combination of SD with a domain modeling method (ORM), we identify and evaluate relationships between their constructs. Basing on the identified relations, ORM to stock and flow diagram (SFD) steps are defined and applied to a real-life case study national medical stores (NMS) situated in Uganda. On completion, we draw conclusions.

Mapping Object Role Modeling 2 Schemes into SROIQ (D) Description Logic

Mapping Object Role Modeling 2 Schemes into SROIQ (D) Description Logic

Conceptual Modelling and the Quality of Ontologies : Endurantism Vs Perdurantism

Ontologies are key enablers for sharing precise and machine-understandable semantics among different applications and parties. Yet, for ontologies to meet these expectations, their quality must be of a good standard. The quality of an ontology is strongly based on the design method employed. This paper addresses the design problems related to the modelling of ontologies, with specific concentration on the issues related to the quality of the conceptualisations produced. The paper aims to demonstrate the impact of the modelling paradigm adopted on the quality of ontological models and, consequently, the potential impact that such a decision can have in relation to the development of software applications. To this aim, an ontology that is conceptualised based on the Object-Role Modelling (ORM) approach (a representative of endurantism) is re-engineered into a one modelled on the basis of the Object Paradigm (OP) (a representative of perdurantism). Next, the two ontologies are analytically compared using the specified criteria. The conducted comparison highlights that using the OP for ontology conceptualisation can provide more expressive, reusable, objective and temporal ontologies than those conceptualised on the basis of the ORM approach.

A standard language for service delivery: Enabling understanding among stakeholders

In Integrated Service Delivery (ISD), multiple service providers have to collaborate in order to serve as a one-stop shop for their clients. Although technical standards have been met, collaboration is difficult. Service providers do not know what kind of information other providers need, are not aware of each other's processes or simply do not understand each other due to the use of ambiguous terms. In this paper, foundations for a language are developed to specify the requirements for ISD and enable the unambiguous understanding of these requirements. A combination of the standards Object-Role Modeling (ORM) and Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) is used to ensure human readability and to have the full expressive power of formal languages. Composed expressions are developed to express logical, temporal, and geographical requirements. This enables service providers to understand how, when, and where services need to be integrated. By utilizing these foundations to generate a standard language for ISD, service providers can collaborate and they can understand complex client requirements which lead to improved ISD.

Managing Social Security Data in the Web 2.0 Era

Social security data management is an important topic both in application of information management and in social security management. In the Web 2.0 era, more and more human information and healthcare information is released to the Internet through various approaches. This abundance makes managing social security data go beyond managing conventional social security database records. How to organize the conventional records together with the related information gathered from the Web is an interesting problem to solve to provide more convenient and powerful social security information service. In this paper, we introduce our initial work on building a Web-oriented social security information system named i-SSIS. I-SSIS is a database system which adopts a new object-role data model named INM model and deploys INM database system as its core. With the assistance of auxiliary tools to carry out social security information extraction, analyzing and query, i-SSIS can properly provide social security-related information gathered from the Web. We introduce the basic ideas of designing i-SSIS and describe the architecture and major components of the system.

Representing object role modeling models with Web ontology language description logic axioms

Object Role Modeling(ORM) has been used in ontology engineering to model domain ontology,which needs to represent ORM models in OWL DL axioms to check semantic conflicts and redundancy with DL reasoners,and to publish ORM ontology on the semantic Web.By means of comparing the semantics of ORM model and OWL DL axioms,equivalently model-converting,and introducing new operators and properties,that mapping rules to represent ORM models in OWL DL axioms was proposed.Except a few constraints,most ORM model elements can be represented by OWL DL axioms.