Transforming a Business and Information Need Goals’ Ontology into a Formal Specification useful for a Strategy Pattern Recommender System

Abstract

From a computer science point of view, ontologies are aimed at getting knowledge from a certain domain and providing a consensual understanding of it. In the conceptualization stage, ontologies can be represented by means of UML models. However, UML models are not semantically machine processable. Therefore, during the implementation stage, ontologies expressed as UML models should be translated into formal languages, which allow inferring the ontology. In this work, we present the ontology transformation made from an UML conceptual specification to an OWL formal specification for the quality evaluation domain. This ontology represents concepts and relationships related with goals (both business and information need goals) at different organizational levels in addition to projects, strategies and strategy patterns, which help to achieve specific evaluation goal purposes. The final aim of the transformation is to have a shared knowledge about evaluation goals and strategy patterns that permit to instantiate the suitable strategy to carry out goal purposes. This will allow us to develop a strategy pattern recommender system, which can be useful during the strategy selection process when implementing quality measurement and evaluation projects.