Enterprise Ontologies – The Holy Grail or the Emperor’s New Clothes?
December 17, 2010
Enterprise ontology was a topic of academic research in the 90s, e.g. in Canada, Holland, and Scotland. This early work was informed by industrial practice in enterprise modeling, and emphasized industrial issues like product design, requirements, organization, manufacturing, transportation, quality, inventory etc. The added value of an ontological approach compared to conventional enterprise modeling was however never clear to industrial practitioners, and ontology remained an academic exercise, which was not picked up by leading tool vendors.
Recently, the fad of the “semantic web” has brought forward an even more theoretical approach to enterprise ontology. Its proponents seem unaware of the earlier work. As before, interoperability is the core concern that ontologies are addressing, e.g. in the IDEAS framework. However, it seems that the focus has moved from interoperability of enterprises to exchange of enterprise models. This post questions if such an approach is viable. In the absence of any evidence that demonstrates that ontologies work in practice, I apologize for the theoretical nature of this post. Read the rest of this entry »
The Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF) of Eclipse is a promising open source platform for building your own model editors. We’ve performed a preliminary analysis of GMF as a platform for our methodologies for model-driven applications, and this post highlights its strengths and weaknesses. We also propose directions for future development of GMF that would simplify the use of the framework and extend its capabilities for view management and model execution.
The upside of GMF is that basic functionality can be put together without programming, based on your own domain specific metamodel. Through additional mappings, different diagrams can be integrated into a coherent architecture, and graphical symbols can be customized. Open source makes it easier for software developers to extend the framework.
On the downside, the programming paradigm of Eclipse is at odds with our end user driven approach. Our direct model execution ambition seems difficult to implement inside a framework based on extensive code generation. While we emphasize queries and views for generating role and purpose specific interfaces, GMF relies more on transformation. Read the rest of this entry »
Is UML Suitable for Model-Driven Applications?
March 13, 2009
During the past decade, model-driven software engineering has matured through the standards developed by the OMG (Object Management Group). Model-driven architectures (commonly known as MDA) and model-driven applications are complementary approaches to developing new IT solutions. Business level enterprise models serve as an excellent starting point for conventional software application development. The main objective of model-driven applications however, is not to increase the amount of software code, but rather to create a new kind of software platform that can be configured and repurposed through modeling, rather than programming. There are therefore some clear differences between MDA and model-driven applications: Read the rest of this entry »
Frank Lillehagen
Håvard Jørgensen
Active Knowledge Modeling 
