OntoMove: A Knowledge Based Framework for Semantic Requirement Profiling and Resource Acquisition

The use of formal knowledge representation structures, or ontologies, has found immense applicability for the interoperability of software systems, e.g., alignment of software and business process models. Toward the management of such knowledge structures, an important foundational problem is that of ontology reuse - it is uncommon for new applications or for different components within one application to use an already available ontology in its entirety. Depending on component specific requirements, typical re-usages are restricted to refined versions of an existing ontology, with the refinement taking the form of a contraction of the knowledge contained therein. Furthermore, when the ontology is used to ascribe meaning to independently existing ´resources´ (e.g., documents collections, source code, software manuals, process template repositories) by way of meta-data, there exists a direct mapping between different views/re-uses of an ontology and their respective semantic scopes within an annotated resource repository thereby leading to the concept of view/reuse dependent resource retrieval. We implement a framework that supports ontology reuse by way of a requirement driven sub-ontology extraction methodology. Additionally, based on this concept of a sub-ontology, we implement the idea of a user/component ´requirement profile´ consisting of semantic descriptions of the user´s interest within a ´resource repository´ that has been annotated with semantic types from the ontology under consideration. A generic framework that implements these ideas and its application in the domains of medical information retrieval systems and business process management systems (BPMS) is presented.