Towards ontology-driven interoperability for simulation-based applications

This paper describes an ontology-driven approach for the design and execution of interoperable simulation applications. The premise of the research described in this paper is that ontologies provide the foundation for determining semantic interoperability and information exchange requirements. Two fundamental problems are inherent to simulation application integration: (i) Semantic Inaccessibility: caused by the failure to explicitly specify the semantic content of the information contained within each simulation subsystem; and (ii) Logical Disconnectedness: caused by the failure to explicitly represent constraints between the information managed by the different simulation subsystems. The paper will (i) describe the technical challenges that motivate our research; (ii) describe how ontologies enable effective simulation application mediation and interoperability; (iii) describe an automation approach for ontology creation from simulation system description data; and (iv) present a real world application example to illustrate the practical benefits of the solution ideas.