A Meta-modeling Approach to Ontological Engineering: DL-Workbench Platform

Abstract

Nowadays many ontological editors are available. However, several specific requirements forced us to search for new principles and to develop a new ontology edition platform called DL-workbench. The platform combines research experience of model-based software architectures and knowledge based engineering. We applied the metainformatics principles in order to satisfy growing requirements of our application domain. DL-workbench contains three main modules. First module defines a meta-model for description of ontological formalisms. It provides an API that allows management of ontological entities, containers of entities, reasoner connection and many other features that are useful when one needs to use an ontological model within its project. A second module of DL-workbench is a formalism-independent user interface for edition of meta-model based ontologies. This module uses the meta-model and is implemented as a plug-in to the IBM Eclipse platform. A third module defines the SHIQ description logic formalism using the meta-model. The third module provides also customization for the user interface of the second module (such as images, literal names, etc.). DL-workbench pays much attention to the management of complex logical equations as well as management of many ontologies within a project. DL-workbench allows easy integration of ontological model with other data inside one standalone or distributed application. DL-workbench can be used both as the ontological editor and as an ontology manipulation platform integrated with other tools and environments. This paper describes our motivation for creation of DL-workbench, implemented features and lessons learned from implementation of ontological editor.