Abstract:

The principal idea of the framework in this paper is to use ontologies to convert a problem domain text description into an object model. The object model of a system consists of objects, identified from the text description and structural linkages corresponding to existing or established relationships. The ontologies provide metadata schemas, offering a controlled vocabulary of concepts. At the center of both object models and ontologies are objects within a given problem domain. The difference is that while the object model should contain explicitly shown structural dependencies between objects in a system, including their properties, relationships, events and processes, the ontologies are based on related terms only. On the other hand, the object model refers to the collections of concepts used to describe the generic characteristics of objects in object-oriented languages. Because ontology is accepted as a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization, we can naturally link ontologies with object models, which represent a systemoriented map of related objects, described as Abstract Data Types (ADTs). This paper addresses ontologies as a basis of a complete methodology for object modeling, including available tools, particularly CORPORUM OntoExtract and VisualText, which can help the conversion process. This paper describes how the developers can use this framework and implement it on the base of an illustrative example.