Transformation Of Ontologies : theoretical foundations and software platform for complex distributed systems

In this book an extremely important problem of interoperability in heterogeneous distributed software systems is addressed. The author proposed a new approach to achieving semantic interoperability in a broad range of distributed software systems (such as multiagent systems and sensors networks) on the basis of hierarchical information modeling guided by concepts and constraints of a correspondent application domain. In accordance with the proposed approach a shared conceptual model of application domain, which is called ontology, becomes a semantic bridge between heterogeneous software engineering models. As a result transformation of ontology represents a hierarchical process which consists of manual connection of incoherent engineering models to shared ontology, automatic discovering of semantically related instances of runtime data structures by logical inference and constraints resolution in finite domain, and manual definition of transformations between instances of runtime data structures driven by constraints on the level of domain ontology and software engineering models.