Toward formalizing domain modeling semantics in language syntax

Information systems are situated in and are representations of some business or organizational domain. Hence, understanding the application domain is critical to the success of information systems development. To support domain understanding, the application domain is represented in conceptual models. The correctness of conceptual models can affect the development outcome and prevent costly rework during later development stages. This paper proposes a method to restrict the syntax of a modeling language to ensure that only possible configurations of a domain can be modeled, thus increasing the likelihood of creating correct domain models. The proposed method, based on domain ontologies, captures relationships among domain elements via constraints on the language metamodel, thus restricting the set of statements about the domain that can be generated with the language. In effect, this method creates domain specific modeling languages from more generic ones. The method is demonstrated using the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Specifically, it is applied to the subset of UML dealing with object behavior and its applicability is demonstrated on a specific modeling example.