(161a) An Overview on Ontocape and Its Latest Applications

This contribution gives an overview on OntoCAPE (OntoCAPE, 2007), a formal, heavyweight ontology for the domain of Computer-Aided Process Engineering (CAPE), and reports on some of its applications. An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization, typically involving concepts, their relations, and axioms for clarifying the intended semantics (Uschold & Gruninger, 1996). In particular, domain ontologies aim at capturing consensual knowledge of an application domain (e.g., physics, chemistry, or engineering) in a generic way such that it can be reused and shared across software systems and interdisciplinary teams.

The OntoCAPE ontology was jointly developed in two large, interdisciplinary research projects: the COGents project (Braunschweig et al., 2002) and the IMPROVE project (Marquardt & Nagl, 2004). Thus, OntoCAPE represents the result of more than 10 person-years of ontology engineering. OntoCAPE aims at providing one single, comprehensive ontology for the CAPE domain, which is applicable to such different tasks as document management, mathematical modeling, plant design, and equipment procurement. This aim is supported by its modular and layered structure, which allows for a proper balance between usability and reusability of the ontology (Morbach et al. 2007); a meta ontology defined on top of OntoCAPE provides additional guidance for an easy configuration and/or modification of the ontology.

Some prototypical software applications have been developed around OntoCAPE, which demonstrate the ontology's potential and its wide range of use.

- In the COGents project, OntoCAPE is used as a communication language for software agents, which retrieve selecting suitable model components for a given process modeling task from distributed libraries (Braunschweig et al., 2004).

- OntoCAPE may also be used as a model specification language for the mathematical modeling of chemical processes (Yang and Marquardt, 2004; Yang et al., 2004).

- Brandt et al. (2006) describe a Process Data Warehouse (PDW), which enables the management of experience knowledge in process design; the PDW utilizes OntoCAPE for the annotation of electronic documents and data stores, and for the formulation of retrieval queries.

At present, we apply OntoCAPE in an industrial project, in cooperation with partners from the chemical and software industries. The goal of this project aims at the development of an ontology-based software prototype for the integration and reconciliation of data from distributed CAPE tools. The software prototype will extract, merge, and consolidate the data from these heterogeneous sources in order to create a single, integrated information base. Within this project, OntoCAPE serves both as a comprehensive data model and as a knowledge base for the consolidation rules.

References:

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