Authors:
Kurt Sandkuhl
;
Christer Thörn
and
Wolfram Webers
Affiliation:
Jönköping University, School of Engineering, Sweden
Keyword(s):
Ontology Engineering, Feature Model, Software Engineering, Knowledge Engineering, Conceptual Integration.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Artificial Intelligence
;
Biomedical Engineering
;
Data Engineering
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Health Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
;
Knowledge Management
;
Knowledge Representation
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Ontologies and the Semantic Web
;
Society, e-Business and e-Government
;
Symbolic Systems
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
Abstract:
Based on an industrial application case from automotive industries, this paper discusses integration of an existing feature model into an existing enterprise ontology. Integration is discussed on conceptual and on implementation level. The main conclusion of the work is that while integrating enterprise ontologies and feature models is quite straightforward on a conceptual level, it causes various challenges when implementing the integration with Prote´ge´. As ontologies have a clearly richer descriptive power than feature models, the mapping on a notation level poses no serious technical problems. The main difference of the implementation approaches presented is where to actually place a feature. The first approach follows the information modeling tradition by considering features as model entities with a certain meta-model. The second approach integrates all features and relations directly on the concept level, i.e. features are considered independent concepts.